


Home Repairs

by linman



Series: Tenebrae [12]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-03
Updated: 2010-02-03
Packaged: 2017-10-07 00:05:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 156,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/59194
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linman/pseuds/linman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Giles and Elisabeth begin the long process of restoration, starting with an old country house in Oxfordshire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue: Lovers' Meeting

_Home is where one starts from._

—T.S. Eliot, _Four Quartets_

 

“There.  Turn there.”

                       Rupert grunted and made the right turn into an unkempt lane.  Through the grasses and unbarbered trees they could see the house where it was set back from the road, a smudge of brick and aged beam.  Rupert negotiated the bumps in the lane slowly and at last pulled up in the drive at the front of the house.  “This the place?”

                       “Yep.”  Elisabeth popped the door and got out.  Rupert followed, slowly.

                       She had just reached the herringbone brick front walk when he said abruptly, “Is that—is that the tweed suit I took you to the tailors for?”

                       She stopped to face him and gave a half-twirl, making her satchel flap briefly out from her side.  “Yeah.”  She frowned at his look.  “What, don’t you like it?”

                       His eyes were on her figure, discreetly, if glamourously, swathed in the two-piece tweed suit she had picked up from the tailor yesterday, just in time for her business appointment.  “Oh, yes, yes I do,” he stammered.  “Very much.  I just….”

                       Her lips twitched.  “What.”

                       He seemed to know he was heading into deep waters: he answered tentatively, “When you said you planned to ‘knock them dead’, I thought you meant in a business way, not in a—in terms of—passion.”  He dearly looked as though he would like to take that last word back, but remained silent.

                       Her lips curved into a full-fledged smirk.  “Rupert,” she said, “I did mean it in a business way.  And I suspect that this ‘passion’ for me in my tweed suit is really more an idiosyncrasy of yours.”  She turned and continued up the walk.  He jumped to catch up with her.

                       “Fine,” he said, “make fun of me.”

                       “A passion,” Elisabeth continued, “that I plan to reward in good time.”  She cocked a smile over at him.

                       “Just like Buffy and Willow and Xander always did.”  Rupert shoved his hands in his pockets.

                       “Oh, no,” Elisabeth said earnestly, “I’m not making fun of you like Buffy and Willow and Xander.  I’m making fun of you in a whole new way.”

                       He snorted.  “Remind me why I came on this little business trip with you?”

                       “For moral support,” she said, for the third time.

                       He sighed.  “You don’t _need_ moral support, Elisabeth.”

                       “I didn’t say I needed it, I said I wanted it.  The man happens to be a pig, and I happen to have my own personal source of testosterone, and I’m not above using it to counter bad vibes when I make a house call.”

                       He grunted.  “Well, if you’d waited a few days, you could have brought Andrew for that.”

                       She snorted; he shot a sidelong glance at her and broke into a little grin, and they both laughed.  But Elisabeth ended the laugh with a sigh.  “Poor Andrew.”

                       “And what about poor Rupert?” he demanded, as they reached the oak front door of the house.  She glanced at him, reaching for the knocker, and decided he was playing up his aggravation for humor.  She answered him in kind.

                       “Did you not hear me say something about a reward, later?”

                       His only answer was a blink and a nonchalant tip of the head.

                       She rapped the door smartly five times with the knocker.  “Besides,” she said quietly as footsteps approached, “It’s hardly poor Rupert on a day he gets to bring Ripper out to play, is it?”

 

*

 

As it turned out, however, Rupert did not bring Ripper out to play.  Instead, exasperatingly, he quickly abandoned his decorative pose as Elisabeth walked over the steps toward purchasing the library from the late Mr Greenbill’s estate, and began to wander over the empty house, studying the bookshelves idly, sucking his front teeth in an infuriatingly absent manner.  _He’s right_, Elisabeth thought; _I would have done better with Andrew_.  But never mind:  she seemed to have Mr Greenbill _fils_ well in hand; or at any rate, he was making no truculent interruptions to her explanations of her role in the selling of the library—cataloguing, preservation, mold cleanup on the books in the study—even her finder’s fee seemed to be going down well.  Elisabeth was secretly waiting for the other shoe to drop.

                       They moved into the study, where most of the incunabula still lived, though some things had already been carefully packed into cartons.  Elisabeth laid her satchel on the only surface in the room, a battered table, and drew out her bulleted list of steps in the selling process.  “Now,” she said, “if we are to meet your goal of getting this library sold within a few weeks, you ought to consider selling it whole to the highest bidder rather than breaking it up and selling it piece by piece, though of course you run the risk of getting a smaller net profit in the long run.”

                       “Well, I’d like to be quit of it as soon as possible,” Mr Greenbill said uneasily as his wife pinched her lips together and wrung her hands, “but—did you say—I might get less money if I sold the whole thing at auction?”

                       She could see the little abacus going behind his weasely little eyes: if he sold the whole library quickly, someone else might realize a large profit, and we couldn’t have that.  On the other hand, if he got it sold quickly he could get a large lump sum all at once, which he could invest elsewhere.  Elisabeth said casually, “Well, it can go either way.  It depends who you get to come to the table, and who’s willing to spend a lot for a mixed bag.  The other option, of course, is to break the library into a few large pieces and auction them—the incunabula, the modern fiction, the limited editions, the children’s lit, the eighteenth century travelogues….”  She stopped as the man’s eyes began to glaze, and at that moment they were interrupted.

                       “Sorry,” Rupert said from the doorway, “but—may I ask—is that a conservatory through here?”

                       “Oh!” Mrs Greenbill jumped as if she’d been pinched.  “Yes, it’s straight through there—of course you’re welcome to look at it.  In fact, I could give you a tour if you’d like….”

                       “Oh, yes,” Rupert said, with courteous absent-mindedness, “a tour would be lovely.”

                       Mrs Greenbill glanced at her husband, as if for permission; he gave it her with what he probably supposed was a regal nod, and returned his attention to Elisabeth.

                       “You’ll have to excuse my partner,” Elisabeth said, with the faintest of flushes.  “He’s like the Elephant’s Child.”

                       Mr Greenbill, still regal, waved a hand.  “Oh, that’s all right, Miss Bowen.  It’s no harm to show the place—though,” he added in a mutter almost to himself, “showing it’s all we’ve managed to do.”

                       Elisabeth cocked her head at him, in polite interest.

                       He heaved a sigh.  “To be frank, Miss Bowen, the library’s actually the least of my concerns.  I’m mostly worried about _this_—” he gestured round at the study— “white elephant.  You wouldn’t happen to know anyone who wants to buy and redo an old house, would you?”

                       Elisabeth shook her head regretfully, looking around the study, which was indeed in sad disrepair.  It was a mercy the books had been found in such good condition.  “How old is it?” she asked, absently.

                       “Restoration era, they tell me.  Which means it’s had a couple centuries to fall apart.  It’s had a fair few owners, and none of them’s held onto it long—except my father, of course.  Dug himself in here and didn’t even do anything to improve the place.”  Mr Greenbill sighed with exasperation.  “I might never get it off my hands.”

                       “Well,” Elisabeth said, “I do wish you the best of luck with it.  It’s a nice old place; pity it’s in such bad shape.”

                       He grunted.

                       In the end, Mr Greenbill swallowed his pride and decided to put the library as a whole on the auction block, which meant that Elisabeth would have her work cut out getting the books catalogued and in proper shape in time.  Rather than have to drag himself up from London to Oxfordshire every day, he elected to give Elisabeth a key to the house so that she could work undisturbed; and he signed the contract Elisabeth had printed out in advance without a quibble.  Elisabeth gave him his copy, stashed the rest of her papers in her satchel, and secreted the key in a pocket of her suit.  They left the study just in time to catch Rupert and Mrs Greenbill ambling down the stairs, Rupert holding forth on Restoration politics and architecture.  His lecture and his self-possession ended at the foot of the stairs where Elisabeth waited with a humorous smile.

                       “Enjoy the tour?” she inquired.

                       “Well—yes,” Rupert said.  “Was quite fascinating, actually.”

                       She looked at him indulgently over her glass-rims.  “I’m almost done here.”

                       “Ah.  Excellent.”

                       While Elisabeth finished the formalities between her and Mr Greenbill, Rupert wandered along the edge of the main lobby of the house.  Watching him from the corner of her eye, Elisabeth thought she could recognize the look of rapt interest taking over her partner’s face as he puttered about the room, examining woodwork and fixtures.

                       _Oh dear_, she thought.

                       She had to pry him loose from the study before they could go.

                       “Well,” she said, when the front door had shut between them and the Greenbills, “that didn’t go half as bad as I thought it would.”

                       “Eh?”  Rupert was walking backward through the barren flowerbeds, craning his neck to examine the dormer attic windows.  “Did he say Restoration?  I could swear that timbering—well, it seems very eclectic.  Fascinating.”

                       “I _said_, that went very well,” Elisabeth said loudly, no longer caring whether Mr Greenbill could hear.

                       He looked at her at last.  “Oh yes?  Well, good.  Very good.”

                       _Who’s wearing the tweed here, you or me?_ she almost said; but in the end merely primmed her lips and stalked toward the car.  “I swear,” she muttered, “sometimes I don’t know whether to laugh or spit.”

                       “What’s that, love?” Rupert said, wandering toward the car, his eyes back on the outline of the old house.

                       “You’re going to trip over something,” she said.  “Come away.”

 

*

 

Though she wasn’t proud of it, Elisabeth felt herself working up into a fine temper as they trundled their way out of the dusty lane.  Rupert paused before pulling onto the paved road, to read the small derelict sign bent atop the mailbox.  “Pyke’s Lea, the place is called,” he murmured, and made his turn.

                       They were almost back in town when he finally noticed the polar ice cap in the passenger seat.  “You know, that was rather fun,” he said.

                       “For you,” she said, scarcely moving her lips.

                       He glanced sharply at her.  “What’s up with you?” he asked.  “I thought you said it went well.”

                       “No thanks to you,” she said.  “‘Is that a conservatory through here?’” She finished off her mockery with a loud snort.

                       “Well,” Rupert said, sounding altogether too damned reasonable, “you didn’t appear to need any help.”

                       “That’s not the point,” she snapped.

                       “Then what is?” he said, finally beginning to sound nettled.

                       Elisabeth drew a deep breath.  “I brought you,” she said, “to support me.  Not go all—” she opened both hands explosively— “diffuse and—in touch with your inner ten-year-old.”

                       “You didn’t need me,” Rupert argued.  “I said it before we went there.  I keep saying it.”

                       “And _I_ keep saying that there’s all the difference in the world between _need_ and _want_.”  Elisabeth glared over at him.  “Besides: I don’t see why you’d pass up a perfectly good chance to play the heavy.”

                       He was silent for a moment, then said evenly:  “You seem to labor under the curious misapprehension that I _enjoy_ ‘playing the heavy,’ as you put it.”  He made a turn, his hands unerring on the wheel.  Elisabeth could see a corresponding tautness in his jaw.  “As a matter of fact,” he went on, quietly, “I dislike it intensely.”

                       And just that quickly it was all there, hanging in the air between them, again.  Elisabeth lowered her eyes: he didn’t need to say the rest, didn’t need to remind her that her cavalier attitude toward his darkness was incongruous with what they were both trying so hard to forget.  Her chin dropped.

                       “I’m sorry,” she said, softly.

                       He tossed his head, mouth primming; opened his lips to make some speech of regret.  But they were on their home street now, and the speech went unsaid.

                       In silence Rupert nosed the car into a parking space on the street, set the parking brake with a firm hand, and turned off the car.  He turned to her.  She waited.

                       “And you know,” he said, “had our positions been reversed, you would have behaved in the exact same way.”

                       “So you do concede my point,” she said, with a faint smile.

                       His eyes crinkled a little.  “And you concede mine.”

                       Elisabeth moved her lips ruefully.  It was not the less damnable that he was perfectly right.

                       “And,” he added, smiling wider, “you do look stunning in that outfit.”

                       “Don’t try to butter me up,” Elisabeth said.  She popped open the door in an attempt to hide her smile.

 

*

 

Rupert pursued her into the kitchen, red herrings of Restoration houses forgotten in the scent and movement of smart new tweed.  She resisted his blandishments long enough to fill the teakettle, feed the cat (who was twisting sinuously between their legs and probably getting cat hairs all over her suit, which was the least of Elisabeth’s worries), and get out a lemon and the soft cheese.  But before she could slice the one or unwrap the other, he got his hands about her waist from behind and breathed softly on the nape of her neck, where a drift of downy hair had slipped from her upswept bun.  Unthinkingly her hand went up blind, to find his cheek, his ear, the soft coarse hair at his temple; and he bent further and kissed her behind the ear.

                       “I hope you’re not trying to collect your reward,” she said, trying, and failing, to put extra tartness into her voice.

                       “As I recall,” he murmured, kissing her hair, “you promised to reward me _not_ for going to help you, but for liking your tweed suit.”

                       “Ah!  Sophistry.”  She trailed her other hand along her forehead and gave a mock-dramatic gasp, leaving his hands the freedom to roam where they liked.  He laughed softly in her ear.

                       She made no objection when he reached out and turned the fire off under the teakettle.

 

*

 

They might well have consummated the moment in the kitchen, in front of the cat and everything, except for the fact that the nightstand drawer in the bedroom was where her diaphragm lived.  So with an effort she broke their kiss and drew him with her out of the kitchen and across the living area, their hands twining together behind her back in anticipation.

                       In the bedroom he turned her to face him and gathered her close; together they worked to remove her tweed suit gently and drape it over the chair, one piece at a time.

                       After that, they were much less gentle with his suit, and her slip and camisole.

                       With one strong-armed swipe he stripped the bed and dropped back on it to kick off his pants; at the same moment she skinned off her underwear and crawled on top of him.  Their mouths met: his hands smoothed round her waist, met, and parted ways—one to follow the furrow of her spine up to the nape of her neck, the other to explore the soft flesh where the division of her buttocks began.  He never got tired of touching her there, it seemed; and neither did she: she arched against him with a gasp, and reached to bury her hands in his hair, knowing he would use the opportunity to flip them over.

                       He did, conforming his body to hers and kissing her mouth so thoroughly that she was obliged to rock them back over so she could get her breath back.  They rolled, over and then over again, sparing a little breath for laughter, finding every moment a new and perfect hold on one another.

                       At last, his eyes dark, her skin tingling, they wriggled together to the head of the bed, where she inched back and let her head fall back into the pillow while his hand reached for the drawer handle.

                       It was the work of only a moment to get them to the place where she arched for him and closed her thighs around his hips.  They did not pause over the momentary relief of their achievement: he raised himself stiff-armed to bear down upon her, and she responded in kind, reaching to grip his shoulders, sharp fingertips slipping on his damp skin.

                       She found again (a miracle that amazed her every time) that sweet place, that moment of abandon that had but a tenuous connection to the cataclysm of her body: that moment of buoyant trust in him, in herself, that was so ephemeral everywhere else but here...a give and take that mirrored the juddering rock of their bodies together; and these mirror images together within her shot pleasure like lightning through her veins, and she let her head fall back with a loud cry.

                       She recovered enough to enfold him more tightly and nurse him to the same conclusion; whereupon he collapsed upon her, shaking (she had noticed that since he came back from the last Sunnydale war he often shook after making love to her), and they breathed together, damp and weary, the blood still hot in their skin.

                       He moved to roll off her, but she held onto him.  “Stay with me a moment,” she whispered, and he obliged her readily.  They waited until their breathing slowed and the throb of their conjoined pulse subsided; then by mutual consent they parted.  He rolled to his back, and she turned her head enough to see his eyelids flutter shut.  Within seconds his breathing was heavy in his sinuses.

                       She had scarcely time for a very faint smile before dropping into sleep herself.

 

*

 

They were both waked when the cat leapt up onto the bed and began picking its way among their sprawled limbs to sniff, first at her shoulder, then at his brow, its dark whiskers brushing forward like delicate oars.  The cat began to lick Rupert’s forehead daintily: the sound of its tongue made Elisabeth break into a sleepy snort of laughter.

                       Rupert screwed up his face.  “Stop that,” he muttered, and turned to tuck his head into the pillow where the cat couldn’t reach.

                       “I think he’s trying to tell us it’s time to get up,” Elisabeth murmured.

                       Rupert snorted.

                       The cat, unfluttered, climbed onto Rupert’s pillow and kneaded itself a nest before settling down just above his mussed damp hair.

                       They lay, silently lazing themselves awake, occasionally meeting eyes contentedly, until Elisabeth blurted softly:

                       “So you gonna buy that house?”

                       He started visibly and looked over at her wide-eyed.  “I hadn’t thought—I wasn’t going to....”  He trailed off as he met her eye.  After a moment he turned fully onto his back again and put his head under his arms, disturbing the cat a little.  “I don’t know,” he said finally.  “I did have little dreams of refurbishing it and....”

                       “...selling it?” Elisabeth finished, uncertainly.

                       His voice, answering, was soft.  “Living there.”

                       They were silent on this for a while, chewing on it.  Finally he turned to look at her over his elbow.  “What d’you think?”

                       She thought about her answer.  “Well...there’s certainly a lot of permanence in that idea.”  She caught the tightening of his lips which spelled both apprehension and longing, and continued:  “Which is both a scary and a nice thought.”

                       A tinge of relief came into his expression and he rolled his head to look back up at the ceiling, sighing deeply.

                       “You should do it,” she said, “if you want to.”

                       He lifted his chin.  “You think?”

                       “You want me to help?” she asked, feeling slightly as though she were scrabbling at an unknown surface: did he want her in this, or out? Or would he be terribly hurt if she remained withdrawn from it?

                       “If you’d like to,” he said, sounding equally cautious.  He hastened to cover it with quick words.  “Of course, it’s early days yet.  I haven’t even decided to do it.  I don’t even know if I could afford the place.”

                       “Oh, that might not be a problem,” Elisabeth said dryly.  “Mr Greenbill said he was having trouble raising interest in the property.”

                       He looked at her quickly.  “Did he really?”

                       Instead of answering, she let a slow grin spread on her face.  He saw it and had to laugh too.  “I suppose,” he said, “I shouldn’t appear too keen, should I.”

                       She smiled gently.  “If you want, you can get your ya-ya’s out when I go out there tomorrow to get started on the books.  Mr Greenbill gave me a key.”

                       The boyish smile she got in answer to this gave her a pang of delight.  “Excellent,” he said, and began a luxurious series of stretches.

                       Elisabeth sat up, stretching too.

                       “What we want,” she said, “is tea.”


	2. A Place of Disaffection

_Go, go, go, said the bird:  human kind_

_Cannot bear very much reality._

_Time past and time future_

_What might have been and what has been_

_Point to one end, which is always present._

—T.S. Eliot, _Four Quartets_

 

_“Come to my house,” Rupert said._

_            Elisabeth took a measured glance at him over her shoulder.  He was dressed now, but lay sprawled catlike on her bed as if he meant to lounge there forever, though they both knew he was leaving in a few minutes.  She made no answer at first, merely fastened her bra at her back and reached for her silk shirt.  “Are you sure you really want me to?” she said, eyes on her hands buttoning, down and down._

_            “It’s not an idle request,” he said, a little testily._

_            “I know,” she said.  “But maybe it’s not such a good idea.”_

_            His voice softened.  “I don’t like being apart from you.”_

_            It was no answer, but she responded anyway:  her glance, meeting his, made him drop his head on his arm with a small, boyish smile.  The boyishness hadn’t failed yet to surprise her; he was pushing fifty, and she had expected a lover of his age, and gravitas, and previous catalogue of suffering to be…what?  She certainly hadn’t expected him to return from his ordeal showing kaleidoscopic flashes of eager delight amid his weariness and worry, or to woo her with unabashed desire whenever he showed up at her flat, or to behave as if she had limitless access to his person and his life.  Like a real partner; like it had always been so.  And somehow it had become so.  Contemplating it always stole Elisabeth’s breath._

_            But she had to bring the objection; he was waiting for it.  She drew a breath.  “Wouldn’t it be a distraction for _ _Willow_ _?”_

_            The beat of silence before his reply seemed packed with meanings.  “I don’t know,” Rupert said casually.  “She might like someone to talk to—someone familiar, I mean.”_

_            Elisabeth steeled herself, and turned around.  “Don’t you know?”_

_            He rolled to his back and contemplated the ceiling.  Rupert evasive was worse than a Chinese puzzle box.  Of course he knew what _ _Willow_ _ would think.  He always knew what she was thinking, now.  And he knew Elisabeth knew, and he knew she suspected that her going to his house would be far more than an innocuous lover’s jaunt.  And possibly the part of him that was deadly angry with _ _Willow_ _ didn’t care.  And if he thought Elisabeth wanted any part of that—_

_            As she waited, Rupert suddenly turned his gaze back to her face.  “I can’t shut up my life in compartments anymore,” he said.  “It’s—” she could see he almost said, “killing me”— “stifling me,” he finished, after a pause.  “_ _Willow_ _ knows I’m with you.  She knows my comings and my goings and whatever of my thoughts I can’t batten down.  You could stay away, but your presence would always remain with me.  We’ve said all this before.”_

_            “I know,” she said, turning back to her dresser and taking out her belt.  “I know.”_

_            “I’m not a fool,” Rupert said, then amended it to, “I’m trying not to be a fool.  I understand your misgivings.”_

_            She had to smile at this.  “I know,” she said again, softly, threading the belt through the loops of her slacks._

_            “You’ll think about it?” he said, and the wistful tone went to her heart as his importunate arguments had not._

_            She turned once more, dressed now as fully as he was.  “I’ll think about it,” she promised him.  “Did you see where I put my shoes?”_

 

*

 

“So what,” Elisabeth said, wrapping a newly-cleaned book carefully in tissue paper, “are you going to do with the old house, if you get this one?”

            She was sitting tailor-fashion on a battered table, wrapping books and occasionally taking a pencil from behind her ear to mark an inventory list, half as often as she swiped a straggling bit of hair out of her face, which she suspected Rupert found in equal parts endearing and annoying.

            “Nothing,” he said, looking up from one of the many waiting books on the table.  “I imagine things will go on as they always have.  The factor will take care of the house, and it’ll revert to my family after I’m gone.  Unless you want it,” he added, with a faint smile.  “I can change my will.”

            “I’d rather you willed me something I’d want to bump you off for,” Elisabeth said, cheerfully.  “Like a pristine first edition of _To Kill a Mockingbird_.”

            “I’ll keep that in mind,” Rupert said, in the same tone.

            There was a silence for a long while, as Elisabeth continued to mark and wrap books.

            “I never really felt like it was mine, anyway,” Rupert said unexpectedly.

            “Mmm.”  Elisabeth almost missed his words, absorbed as she was in the examination of a three-volume novel.  By the time his meaning caught up with her, she looked up only to find that he had taken up a different book and absorbed himself in its pages.

            _No_, she thought, _you wouldn’t, would you?_

            But she left it unsaid.

            Presently Rupert looked up from the book he was holding and surveyed the carefully-stacked piles of books waiting all around the room.  “You’re going to pack all these yourself?  Why not get in some help?”

            Elisabeth said without looking up:  “If you want something done right....”

            Rupert rolled his eyes in agreement.  “Then I don’t suppose you’d want me to do anything,” he said, tentatively.

            “You can if you want to,” Elisabeth said.  “You’re included in the ‘do it myself’ part.  The inventory lists are in that pile, and the tissue paper is in that pile, and you can put together a box and stick a number on it.  But—” she looked up with a little smile— “if you’d rather putter around and examine your beloved some more, my feelings won’t be hurt.”

            “Oh,” Rupert sighed, idly searching one of the inventory lists for the title of the book in his hand, “I doubt I could ferret out all her secrets in one fortnight.”

            As if in dry response, a small shudder of creaks passed through the house over their heads; a whistling crack of wind sounded outside the French doors of the study, and the dust motes wandering in the patch of sunlight across the room stirred a little, like bees changing course for some distant-scented orchard.

            “See?” Rupert said.  “She’s talking to us.”  He was only half joking; Elisabeth could hear the lovestruck deeps in his voice.  She looked up at the fading paint on the plaster ceiling.  Centuries of smoke and dust had obscured the patterns dimly sketched in once-bright colors: their own personal Sistine Chapel, primed for restoration, a project far more ambitious than her current task of inventorying and packing a three-thousand-volume library.  She understood Rupert’s enthrallment:  she could see, almost from the inside—from the doorway, as it were—into his private discovery, like a child with a cigar box of treasures elevated from the ordinary, or the man in the parable who found a marvel in a field, hid it, and sold off everything to buy the field for its hidden treasure.  So far Rupert had been canny enough to avoid Mr Greenbill, knowing his keenness would jack up the price.

            “Don’t look so apprehensive,” Rupert said.  “I’m sure there’s nothing wrong.  It’s an old house; it settles.”

            She lowered her gaze to him and smiled reassuringly.  “I was just thinking maybe we could get a better bargain if we convinced Mr Greenbill the house was haunted.”

            He snorted.  “Don’t even joke about that.  Laying a ghost is the devil and all; not worth a few pounds.”  He found the book’s title on the inventory sheet and ticked it.  “Did you want the box number next to the title?”

 

*

 

On the day the movers came to pick up the hundred some-odd boxes Elisabeth (and Rupert) had so carefully packed, Elisabeth herself was manically dividing her attention between the constant chirp of her new cellphone and the abstract for her thesis, the deadline of which had already been extended a week.  Into all this sound and fury, Mr Greenbill descended with a real estate agent and a group of prospective buyers for the house.  Rupert, who had been lurking about to make sure that the movers didn’t bump the carved wainscoting in their zeal to transfer the books to the auction house with the greatest celerity, looked as though he were tempted to take Elisabeth’s whimsical advice and start making spooky noises from the attic, when he saw them alighting from the Mercedes out front.  But he saw Elisabeth give him an eloquent glance from her hiding place in the barren kitchen behind her laptop, and went instead to commandeer the Greenbill and his company, and attach himself to their tour.

            Elisabeth was grateful, but she worried that Rupert’s enthusiasm for the place, even contained, would inspire the buyers to take a second look at the cracked plaster and water-stained ceilings and realize the possibilities.  But she hadn’t reckoned with the power of Rupert’s class.  By the time the party descended from the main stair, dodging a pair of movers in dusty coveralls as they handcarted out another three boxes, the buyers had looks of bright enthusiasm hitched forcibly onto their faces, and Mr Greenbill had discovered that Rupert was of that sort of money that views major purchases with a calm and purposeful clemency.  He was practically fawning on Rupert as he saw them out the door, and even forgot to ask Elisabeth to return the house key he’d given her.

            Elisabeth had time to be impressed for about ten seconds before her phone rang again.

 

*

 

That night Elisabeth lay blank and stunned on her bed while Rupert massaged peppermint moisturizer into her feet.

            “You finish the abstract?” Rupert asked.

            “Mmm-hmmm,” she replied, eyes closed.  “That feels good.  Keep doing that.”

            He obliged readily.  She opened her eyes after a while to see that he was smiling a small, secret smile.

            “So did you actually open negotiations with the Greenbill today, or did you merely prime the hell out of him?”

            The smile edged uncontrollably into a wicked smirk, confirming Elisabeth’s suspicions.  “I think I’ve got him where I want him.  I gave him my mobile number as they left, and he called an hour later and asked if I’d like to have lunch with him tomorrow.”

            “Good….You get your house, and I get my nice fat check for my book-brokering services.”

            Rupert made a noise, and she opened her eyes again.  “What.”

            “I’d better not tell you what he said.”

            She groaned.  “Oh, go ahead and tell me.”

            “He said something about the, er, fortuitousness of our being partners, and vaguely mooted knocking off the price of the house in lieu of paying you.”

            “_What!_”  Elisabeth very nearly rocketed to a sitting position.

            “I gave him a very icy silence and then told him that my partner was a professional, and expected full payment for her services.  I, meanwhile, was prepared to pay whatever is deemed an adequate price for the house _if_ I chose to buy it.”

            Elisabeth let her head fall back again, growling.  “What a dick.  He doesn’t deserve that house.  Or the books.  Or the money.”

            “I did briefly consider hinting to him that the house was cursed, just for that.  But that would have involved explaining my knowledge of the supernatural.  Not worth scaring the little pissant.”

            Elisabeth snorted into a giggle.

            “Other foot now?”

            “Yes, please, love.”

 

*

 

The summer wore on, hot and unusually dry, and Elisabeth sweated under the frantically-clicking ceiling fans in her flat, making up the work she had missed during her medical leave in the spring, eyes oily, jumping at the occasional shadow, plagued now and then with the nightmares she hadn’t yet been able to shake; but the sheer weight of the work, and the novelty of Rupert’s busyness, kept her on a more or less even keel.

            Rupert meanwhile took on the process of closing on his house with far more alacrity than he was devoting to his work with the “New World Order” as Xander jokingly called it.  He swam in blueprints and inspectors’ reports and contracts, muttering darkly, and shed papers everywhere he went as copiously as Elisabeth did.  At night, when neither of them was sitting up with some midnight task or other, they lay awake in the darkness and sweated.

            One evening Brian showed up and found them each poking owlishly at their own stack of papers, and chivvied them both to the pub for dinner.  He got them eating, but getting them articulate was more than Brian’s considerable talents at chivvying could encompass.  “Hasn’t this country heard of air conditioning?” was all Elisabeth could mutter, after demolishing half a basket of fish and chips.  Rupert’s response was a monosyllabic growl that Brian thought he could possibly interpret as, “Like your country can talk.”

            “Have to look into new ceiling fans,” she grunted at Brian, picking up another bit of fish.  “Mine are fixing to racket themselves right off the ceiling.”

            Rupert surfaced into the land of the verbal.  “Yes, nothing makes for a romantic interlude like worrying the bloody fan’s going to crash down on your heads.  A tenderer nothing has never been whispered in my ear, I _don’t_ think.”

            Brian glanced in horror at Elisabeth, prepared to see her responding in wounded offense, but instead her face twisted into a pained laugh, and she leaned her forehead on the back of her hand, snickering at Rupert.  “Oh, God, that was such a fiasco.”

            “It was,” he agreed, dabbing with his napkin at his grin.

            “D’you think it’s any cooler in College?” Elisabeth asked Brian.

            Brian stifled a disbelieving laugh.  “Are you seriously proposing taking rooms in College so you and Rupert can get your conjugal due?”

            “Conjugal due, my arse,” Rupert said, and at the same time Elisabeth responded, “Forget conjugal dues, I need some _sleep_.”

            “Then no,” Brian said.  “It wouldn’t be any better in College.  It’s better at _my_ place—I bought a window-box A/C last year—but if you think I’m inviting the pair of you to bunk at my flat—”

            Elisabeth and Rupert snorted as one.

 

*

 

Neither of them was expecting disaster when Rupert asked her point-blank, as they were taking tea in the kitchen the next afternoon, if she had come to the end of her knowledge.

            Elisabeth thought about it calmly, and decided that the little knowledge remaining to her was no danger to anyone.  “Well, I only saw the first episode of the next season of _Angel_ before I skipped dimensions.  I was traveling a lot at the time, you know, and didn’t have consistent access to a TV—”

            But Rupert interrupted.  “I beg your pardon.  I thought you said the program was called ‘Buffy.’”

            Elisabeth blinked at him.  “It was.  Angel got a spinoff when he went to L.A.”

            He squinted hard at her.  “Angel has his own show?”

            “I can’t believe you didn’t know this.  I told Xander back in Sunnydale; I thought it’d have got around to everybody and their dog by now.”

            “Well, why didn’t you tell _me_?”

            “You didn’t ask.”

            He huffed and rolled his eyes.  “Oh very well.  What happened in the last episode of _Angel_ that you saw?  God, this is so befuddling.”  He shaded his eyes with one weary hand.

            “Well, it’s all gotten very fuzzy, but the salient point was that somebody sent the amulet to Angel at Wolfram &amp; Hart and he dropped it and Spike came out of it.  So Spike’s on Angel’s show now.”

            For a moment Rupert just stared at her.  She waited until he spoke, absorbing it.  “Somebody sent the amulet to Angel.  He dropped it, and Spike came out.  Was it destroyed?”

            Elisabeth thought about this.  “I don’t think so.  I think it just fell out of the envelope onto the office floor.”

            “Which brings me to my next question.  What has Wolfram &amp; Hart to do with it?”

            She frowned at him.  “Well, you know.  The Senior Partners gave Angel and his crew the L.A. offices of Wolfram &amp; Hart to do with as he pleased.  You know, fighting from inside the belly of the beast and all that.”

            “No,” Rupert said, “I don’t know.  All I know is that the amulet came from a dubious place.  Are you telling me it came from Wolfram &amp; Hart?”

            “Well, yes.  Devil’s bargain and all that.  Don’t look like that,” Elisabeth said.  “It was the only way to…well….”  She stopped, thinking hard.  “There was a very good reason why he accepted.  But—for some reason I can’t remember what it is.  That’s strange.  I’m totally blanking on this.  I remember it involved some alteration of reality….”  She stopped again, eyes unfocused, but the events of Angel’s story had completely dissolved into a matte blur.  “An alteration of reality,” she repeated, softly.  “Damn.”

            It was then that she realized that Rupert was no longer in the kitchen with her.  Distantly, her bedroom door shut with a sharp snap, saved from a slam at the last minute, she could tell by the sound.  She waited, frozen, for the sound she knew she would hear next:  Rupert’s voice on the phone to Buffy.  But when at last she did hear it, she was no less dismayed than she would have been had it been a surprise.  He wasn’t shouting; he wasn’t bothering to speak quietly.  He was speaking with an emotionless rage that turned Elisabeth’s blood hot and then cold.  She tried very hard not to hear any of the words, but some of them bled through the horrid silence anyway, and she forced herself to move over to the sink and begin to wash their teacups, to drown them out.

            _What could you mean by_…_making a fool of me_…_trust _him_ but you don’t trust_…_absolute travesty_….

            And then, words that rose above even the pitch of the running water:  _“We had a bargain!_”

            Elisabeth shook so that she dropped the teacup she was washing in the sink.  It didn’t break, though she picked it up and felt it all over for hairline cracks.

            “I don’t think it’s comparable,” Rupert said coldly as she turned off the water.  There was a long silence, then, “I don’t give two shits about Spike, can’t you get that through your head?  It’s _you_.”

            “Oh, Rupert, Rupert,” Elisabeth whispered to the teacups, beaded with water in the drainer.

            He said:  “How long were you going to wait before telling me?  Just tell me that.”

            Elisabeth shut her eyes tight.

            He said, enunciating:  “There was nothing she could do.  What was the point in—?  Oh, balls.  What about that bloody amulet, eh?  What about that great bloody barracks of an evil law firm that could wipe us all out with the stroke of a pen?…Oh, the Council, my arse.  For all their compromises they never got into bed with a houseful of evil lawyers….Well, fuck,” he said, anticlimactically, and Elisabeth knew that Buffy must have hung up on him.

            There was a very long and dreadful silence throughout the flat.  Elisabeth trembled and tasted bile at the back of her tongue.

            Presently she heard him get up and open the door, and his footsteps sounded inexorably in the corridor, coming her way.  She held onto the counter to steady herself, and fixed her gaze on the wall.

            He was in the doorway, and it was too late to caution him to think twice about attacking Buffy, too late to warn him that he could so easily expose himself to hurts he couldn’t bear.  Too late to be angry with him for being such a fool.

            His gaze was upon her, still trembling at the counter.  She heard him give a great sigh.

            “It’s not your fault,” he said.

            Of course it wasn’t her fault, but now she was plainly exposed to miseries that were coming for her, coming for them both, and wasn’t that as bitter as real shame?

            “You didn’t know I didn’t know,” he said.

            “No,” she breathed.

            “You thought it was safe.  _I_ thought it was safe,” he added in a mutter.

            What on earth was wrong with him, stating the obvious like this?  She turned around to face him.

            “It’s merely academic,” she said quietly, “whether I’m Pandora or the box.”  She watched the shot go home, and then said:  “I need to go and take a walk.”

            He said nothing as she edged past him, shrugged into her windbreaker, and stepped out into the sultry afternoon light.

 

*

 

They should have been able to work it off in some burst of meaningless quarrelling, or some hideous spasm of black humor, or any of the numberless rituals of everyday living they had developed—one washing dishes and the other drying; or one gathering scattered books and the other sorting them—but somehow it didn’t happen.  They ate dinner.  They did the washing up.  They did some work.  They went to bed, with the bathroom light shining out into the hall outside the bedroom.

            Elisabeth lay with her back to him, trying to curb her spasmodic shivering, but before she had reached control, Rupert said, in a soft whisper:  “Please, Elisabeth…don’t make yourself ill.  It’s not your fault.”

            If he had spoken with less compassion, perhaps Elisabeth would merely have been stung; but she reacted to his concern as if it were condescension, and she actually responded.

            “No,” she said, going still at last.  “It’s yours.”

            She waited for him to react; waited to feel him go rigid in the bed, to return fire, to defend himself.  But all he did was give a little sigh and turn over.  And they were quiet.

            Elisabeth slept; and in the small hours her nightmare wrapped her again in its suffocating fug.  _How boringly predictable_, she thought before the scene took over her mind again:  Rupert pinning her, sneering at her, and her mirror image drawing her soul out to itself; the hatred generated in every cell of her body for her own pitiful cries, the total sense of abandonment by both good and evil; she was alone, and nothing, and Rupert could not love her—

            She fought her way out of the dream, kicking and whimpering, but Rupert clung to her, gripping one struggling arm and holding her down.  A cry broke from her throat.

            “Elisabeth.  Elisabeth!  It’s me.  You’re only dreaming again.  That’s all it is.  You’re home, and safe.  You’re only dreaming.”

            Oh, how she hated this moment in particular: the moment his words became pregnant not with threat but urgent comfort.  It never failed to bring her gorge up in revulsion at herself.  “You can’t save me,” she muttered, as the dream-fug began to clear from her consciousness.

            “You don’t need saving, love,” he said in the darkness, and she began, pitifully, to cry.  Struggling free of his arm, she sat up in bed, swallowing gorge and tears together.  But it wasn’t going down, it was coming up instead, and with a snort of frustration she lurched out of bed and to the bathroom, to heave for the few minutes it would take her body to calm itself.

            When it was finished, she washed her clammy face and her hands, patted them slowly dry with the handtowel, and trudged back to bed.

            Rupert said nothing as she straightened the covers and climbed back in, but she knew he was awake.  She too was awake now, and she remembered that she had gone to sleep angry with him.  “That was just too predictable,” she muttered, reaching for a tissue to blow her nose.

            “They don’t seem to be going away,” he said quietly.  “The dreams, I mean.”

            Elisabeth lay down, biting her tongue to stop the sarcastic inquiry whether she was neglecting to do something about her dreams.  She was, after all.  “I’m okay,” she answered him, settling in under the covers.  The drowsy counterreaction was stealing over her, and she wanted nothing more than to give in to it.

            He sighed audibly, and settled down himself, turning over so that his back was to her in the darkness.

            Before she could stop herself, and before he could fall asleep, she blurted:  “Do you love me?”

            She heard him move, turning his head as if to look back over his shoulder.  There was a pause; then:  “Yes.”

            Elisabeth sighed, and after a long, uneasy silence, they were both asleep once more.

 

*

 

Rupert and Buffy didn’t exactly make up: they sniped at each other in group emails for a few days and then got tired of maintaining the posture; and so this conflict, like so many others before it, quietly salted the ground of their relationship, and nothing was said or done to stop it.  Elisabeth saw the emails, and heard the brief, cold telephone exchanges a room away; but she said nothing to Rupert, and he treated her with a faint distance as well.

            It was because of the proliferating conflict that Rupert neglected to give her the details of his negotiations with the Greenbill for the house.  All Elisabeth knew was that he muttered more than usual, left stacks of papers about, and plowed his hand through his hair more often.  In a more seasonable time, Elisabeth would have laughed at him, smoothed his hair, kissed him, and invited him to tell her all about it; but now she merely shot him furtive glances from over her books, and he gave her long looks that were not quite glares.

            The summer air grew closer and thicker; rain was imminent, they said, but it never came.  Elisabeth could feel Rupert’s frustration permeating the flat likewise, and so she felt a relief totally incongruous with the pressure of weather and work when he appeared at her desk that evening and set a cup of tea at her elbow.  She looked askance at it for only a second; he went away without a word, and she decided to drink the tea.  His relief when he reentered the room and saw her sipping at it was palpable.

            But it did not cure his isolation.  Elisabeth worked and drank her tea; and felt Rupert descending into paralysis on the other side of the room.  She was just making up her mind to stop work to talk to him when she heard him slap shut the folder at his place at the dining table.  Three books followed, thumping one by one into an impatient stack.

            Elisabeth twisted around in her chair in time to see him standing up, a closed look on his face.  “I’m going out,” he said.  He wasn’t looking at her, and it seemed to Elisabeth that he almost wasn’t really talking to her, either.

            She didn’t even open her mouth to protest; and it never occurred to her to ask where he was going.  She merely watched him put on a windbreaker (utterly useless in the sultry weather, but force of habit ruled, as she well knew), check his pockets briefly, and disappear.  The door clicked softly shut behind him.

            Elisabeth went back to work.

            Without Rupert in the house, the words came much more easily and in an unfettered surge.  She finished the analysis of one book, tossed it onto the discard pile on the floor (invariably any book added to this pile caused the whole thing to topple and require straightening later, but nobody cared), and took up the next.

            She didn’t realize how much time had passed until she sat up to stretch her arms and take a sip of the tea Rupert had made her, and found it cold and rancid.  She looked inside the cup, then at the clock.  Rupert had certainly been gone a while.

            Well, this was nothing out of the way.  She resisted the urge to worry, and got back to work.

            An hour later she gave up attempting to concentrate on the new section she was writing and got up to dump out the tea mug.  She began to contemplate seriously what she might do if Rupert didn’t come home soon.  As she washed the mug, she noticed at last that he had made no attempt to make tea for himself: all the dishes and cups were put away, and after making her cup he had washed out the kettle and put it in the drainer.  Had he planned it this way? she wondered suddenly.  Made her a cup of tea, gauged her pliability, salved his conscience, and then….

            She brushed that thought aside as selfish.  After all, it was a free country and Rupert Giles was a big boy.  She wasn’t going to worry about him.

            Much.

            No, she was going to go to bed, as a matter of fact, and sleep soundly, and…hopefully wake up next to him in the morning.

            The going to bed part she managed okay.  But she realized, once all the lights in the flat (except the bathroom light) were out and the doors locked and the windows cracked at just the right width to tempt in the night air, that it had been a very long time indeed since she had gone to bed alone.

  

  1. “I’m glad we had this talk.”
  



            With the cat at her side, Elisabeth dozed and jerked awake, off and on, as the night deepened.  Outside she could hear the quiet of the city sleeping; every now and then a car rumbled past, and she waited to hear if the car would stop and deposit a passenger at her front door.  But it never did.  She watched the luminous numbers of her digital alarm.  _One more hour, and I’ll call_…_Fifteen minutes; no, I’ll give him _one_ more hour_….

            One more hour….

            To Elisabeth’s overwhelming relief, within the allotted hour her strained hearing picked up the soft scrape of footsteps at her front door.  Keys jangled in the lock, a protracted noise that confirmed Rupert’s expected state; finally the door cracked open and the footsteps shuffled inside.  The door shut, a little more firmly than planned, perhaps, but the movements that followed had the same sound of gentle vagueness as before.  There was a silence, followed by some bumping about, and at last Rupert’s shadow crossed the light that fell into the corridor from the bathroom.  She squinted against the glare: his outline didn’t look demony, so she lay back and waited with her eyes half shut.  The cat got up, arched, stretching, and plopped off the bed; he didn’t appear upset, so Elisabeth relaxed.  The cat did, however, decide it would be funny to get under his human’s feet; Rupert stumbled, put down a hand on the foot of the bed, and muttered an oath.

            Still muttering about damn cats, he sat down on his side of the bed to undress.  Elisabeth heard his boots thump to the floor one by one, followed by the thin flump of his jumper and the less soft sounds of his jeans.  He murmured something else unintelligible and fumbled down the covers on his side of the bed before slumping down.

            It took some squirming and a little bumping against her before he settled down lumpishly to sleep.  She could smell the smoke in his hair, and the particular quality of his scent told her exactly which pub he had been to.  Elisabeth filed away this bit of information, in case she should need it on another occasion. 

She turned over, and unhappily followed her partner to sleep.

 

*

 

The alarm woke Elisabeth early the next day, and she nearly turned over and slapped it off.  But her work wouldn’t wait, so she struggled up and out of the bed, pulling on her bathrobe before she could change her mind about getting up.

            She turned, heart beating hard against morning vertigo and fear, to see if Rupert were…normal.  He was:  he was breathing slow and heavily through his nose, his hair was a wreck and needed washing, and she could hardly ignore his scent.  But he wasn’t a demon, and he appeared to be in good health, so she drew a steadier breath and went to hit the shower.

            Under the spray her mind came awake, laying out the day’s work, plotting personal deadlines for this and that accomplishment.  God, but she was tired.  For a moment she wondered if she were ever going to be able to live without this constant struggle to bring herself to the task, even and sometimes especially the tasks she loved.  But she decided this was a fruitless train of thought, and erased it as best she could by turning up the heat on the water and letting the spray beat the cold depression out of her chest.

            Rupert was up when she emerged: he was not in the bedroom, and she could hear and smell coffee brewing.  She dressed, a quirky amalgam of black skirt, heavy boots, and light cotton blouse, comfortable but dignified enough for public appearance; since her illness she had taken to dressing more professionally, as if to prove to the world that she viewed finishing her degree as serious work.

            She felt near tears.  This was not a good beginning.

            In the kitchen Rupert stood hunched over the counter, popping open a bottle of aspirin one-handed.  A glass of water and a full cup of coffee awaited his attentions.  Elisabeth moved delicately around him (he did smell quite ripe, she thought with a mixture of resentment and pity), plucked a go-cup from the cabinet at his side, and filled it with coffee.  “Lots to do today,” she said, as she filled the cup and added milk and sugar.

            Rupert grunted: more response than she’d hoped for, actually.

            “Probably won’t be home for dinner,” she said.  “You should forage.”

            He gave another grunt that bordered on a groan.  Probably, she thought, it was the mention of food.  Well, tough.

            Elisabeth, to her own exasperation, was beginning to feel a grovelling sort of compassion for him, as if by giving him every benefit of every doubt she could reinstate him forcibly on his feet, as if her own compassion might singlehandedly prevent him from ever slipping into paralysis and escapism again.  She hated being this sort of person, and she hated the other sort of person she wanted to be, which was the resentful one who sniped at him and punished him.  The only thing to do, obviously, was flee.

            She packed up her satchel and beat a hasty retreat, without bidding Rupert goodbye.

 

*

 

The day’s work went poorly, but Elisabeth plugged away heroically, switching between reading and writing when either got to be too much.  At lunchtime she ducked out of College and bought a sandwich, which she took away to a quiet spot and ate. The wind kicked up the branches of trees overhead, and she drew up her knees on the bench and tucked her skirt awkwardly around her ankles.

            Back at her work table, she found that the writing and notetaking she had left waiting had grown utterly opaque and impossible to break into again.  She sat down wearily and propped her forehead on the heel of her hand, blowing out her cheeks in a long sigh.  She couldn’t take this home; she’d get even less done, especially with Rupert in his current state—whether paralyzed over his own work, or out quietly carousing to his own misfortune.  Perhaps she could get a room for the night in College, go home quietly, pack a bag, explain to Rupert—

            Was this how it happened?  Was this how people who loved each other fell apart from one another?

            To her dismay, she found bitter, stinging tears gathering full and sliding down her face.  Quietly, so that no one should see, she wiped her fingers under her glass-rims and got up to find the restroom, where she could cry quietly in private.

            _Crying is all well and good_, she quoted to herself as she finished, _but afterwards you still have to figure out what to do_.  “Oh, this is so stupid,” she said out loud.  What was stopping her from calling Rupert and asking for a council of two on the matter?  _I’m feeling dreadful_, she anticipated saying, _and I’m thinking of staying here a night to finish my work.  But_, she continued, washing her face at the sink, _I don’t want to be apart from you if you’re—no, if I’m—no—if it’s a bad time.  What are you thinking?_

            She dried her face with paper towels, settled her glasses back on her nose (crookedly; every pair of glasses she owned wound up sitting crooked on her face), and went out to the quad with her new cell-phone.  The promised rain was on its way:  grey clouds were blowing in, and there was a fresh coolness to the air that seemed to make everyone she saw breathe easier as they went about their business.

            He answered his mobile number on the third ring.  “Rupert,” she began, drawing a deep breath.

            “Elisabeth, I’m terribly sorry, but I can’t talk right now.”

            “Huh?”  She blinked.

            But he was going on, without a pause, brisk and arid-voiced, as if he’d never had a hangover in his life.  “It’s a bad time.  Can I call you back?  I’ll call you back.”

            “But—”

            “Unless,” he changed tracks suddenly, “you’ve got something of an—er—unusual nature to report?”

            She had no idea what he meant until it occurred to her, a second later, that he might be in the company of someone in front of whom he could not speak freely.  “No,” she said, feebly.

            “Right.  Fine.  Talk to you later.  Yes.  Bye.”  Click.

            Elisabeth took the little phone away from her ear and stared at it.  “All-righty then,” she said, with sarcastic cheer, and snapped the phone shut.

            “So much for worrying about him,” she muttered as she stalked back up to her work table.

            The pique, however, cleared her brain somewhat, enabling her to get back to work.  By the time she had written a whole paragraph she had also rearranged her plans.  She would stay here in the common room as long as necessary, then get a taxi home at whatever hour she happened to be finished.  And Rupert could go hang.

            This was enough to carry her through the rest of the afternoon.  The sky darkened outside the windows, and in good time the rain began to spatter pleasantly against the glass.  As Elisabeth worked, the skies opened, so that by the time evening arrived, she looked up to find that she was alone and all the outside sounds had been muted by the wet.  She drew a long, long breath and let it out.  She felt hungry, and wondered if perhaps she should knock off work, at least to eat.

            A familiar footstep sounded outside the door, and she turned to see Rupert in the doorway, a furled umbrella in his hand pointing loosely at the floor.  Instead of the jeans and duster she would have expected, he was dressed in slacks and a black oxford shirt open at the neck.  What arrested her attention, however, was not his sartorial excellence but his buoyant air of radiant pleasure.  His mouth was calm, but his eyes were bright.  As she watched, he reached into his pocket and drew out a tarnished brass key.

            “Rupert….” she said slowly.

            The grin spread from his eyes to his lips.  He twirled the key in his fingers, watching her begin to smile in answer.

            “Do you mean…?”

            “Last paper signed today,” he said quietly.

            Elisabeth began to grin.

            “She’s all ours,” Rupert said.

            For several moments they were silent, grinning widely at each other.

            “Can you spare some time this evening?”

            Her spirits suddenly rose to an answering lightness.  She reached to the table and flipped her book shut with a flourish.

 

*

 

Out on the street, he took her heavy satchel from her and unfurled the umbrella in two smooth, happy motions.  “I’ve packed us a picnic,” he said.  “Hungry?”

            “Ravenous,” she said, and at the sideward slant of his happy glance toward her, she reached impulsively for his hand and kissed it.  “God,” she said, “I’m so happy it rained.”

            He laughed aloud.  “In England, that’s saying something.”

            “Isn’t it, though?”

            He handed her gallantly into his car, and they shot little grins at each other the whole of the now-familiar drive to Pyke’s Lea.  The house, dripping in the wet twilight, looked both peaceful and lonely, and more appealing than Elisabeth had ever seen it.

            He popped open the boot to reveal a pile of blankets, a wicker picnic basket with the neck of a bottle of wine protruding from under the lid, a paper sack heavy with groceries, and a small, battered boombox.  She helped him gather the accoutrements, and they crunched over the gravel of the drive to the brick front walk.

            It seemed that the house even had a different scent once it was their own.  The door opened onto the lonely empty foyer, and Rupert fumbled for light switches.  As they moved further into the house they brought their carnival air with them, so that soon every available light was burning and Elisabeth and Rupert were laughing heartily at nothing in particular.

            “Where do you want the blankets?” Elisabeth said, her voice half-muffled in the pile.

            “In the study,” he said.  “I thought we’d eat there.”

            “Right you are.”  The study was easily the most beautiful and inviting room in the house; clearly the builder of Pyke’s Lea had loved books, for the original shelving stretched high toward the painted ceiling.  _That’s a lot of books for that time period_, she mused.

            “I’d light a fire,” Rupert said, gesturing at the grand fireplace with its ancient mirror paneling above the mantel, “but I’ve no idea when the chimneys were swept last.”

            They put down their burdens and began to arrange them a little; but after a moment Rupert straightened to see Elisabeth standing, smiling softly at him.

            “So,” she said.  “Do I get a tour?”

            He crossed the room to her, took her hand, and brought it to his lips.  “I thought you’d never ask,” he said.  Their eyes met, and they both smiled.

 

*

 

“I’m sorry about the phone call, you know,” he said, as he took her up the stairs.  Their feet made a pleasant heavy sound on the seasoned wood.

            “What phone call?  Oh, yeah,” she said, remembering.  “I don’t think it’s important anymore.  Were you closing the deal?”

            “Mm-hmm.  If you go this way, I’ll show you what I want to do with this corner room.”

            He led her about, his hand twined with hers, and told her at last his dreams in detail.  Their footsteps echoed from room to room, and she found herself adding to his ideas:  “And if we plastered that, we could paint it the same white as the….”  “Once this floor’s sanded it should be beautiful all on its own.”  At last they made their way round to the last room on that floor.  “This,” he said, resting his chin on her hair from behind, “is the master bedroom.  What do you think—a pale green, perhaps?”

            “Or a very soft periwinkle,” she added softly.  The last of the rain-washed gloaming was shining in through the windows, and Rupert behind her was both dark shadow and warm substance.  It occurred to her suddenly that in all the heat and work and bother, she had missed him terribly.  He kissed her hair, and she tightened her hold on his hand, her skin glowing warm under her clothing.

            “Shall we?” he murmured.

            She turned to him, holding in a grin.  “Shall we what?”

            “Eat,” he said, as if there could be no other answer; but his eyes twinkled in the half-darkness.  “There’s a whole picnic downstairs waiting to be demolished.”

 

*

 

They ate, couched comfortably on the blankets he had packed: chicken salad sandwiches and pickles of all sorts and three cheeses and still-faintly-warm French bread, and red wine and lemonade and olives.  When they were on their third glass of wine apiece, he drew out the _pièce de résistance_: two very small ramekins filled with—

            “Oh, good heavens, is this crème brulée?”

            His grin had gone louche with the wine and their relaxed mutual company.  Delighted, she took the spoon he handed her and cracked the surface of her custard.  At the first bite she rolled her eyes to the mysterious frescos and sucked the spoon with a little moan.  He dug into his own custard and gave her a hooded glance.

            “I’m not so full I can’t finish this,” she said; and she did finish it, with him laughing at her in delight.

            “Care to dance?” he asked her, getting up and going over to plug in the boombox.  He pressed a button, and a cassette tape scratched to life: slow, sensuous jazz that instantly brought her eyes up to his.  She took his outstretched hand and got to her feet.

            “I’m not very good at dancing, you know.”

            “Somehow I doubt that,” he said softly, with a wicked glance.  “And there’s nothing a little fresh experience can’t cure.”

            She found herself instantly in his arms, her hands curving up over his strong shoulders, his drawing her close from behind, their faces close, his soft eyelashes cast low.  Warmth grew between them, and his hands moved to guide hers into position.  And they began to dance, as if they had been doing it for years and knew one another’s moves from old.

            She stumbled once, and they giggled, recouped their balance, and twirled like youths.  Her skin tingled.  It was going to be tonight.  Her blood was singing the certainty back to her.  It was going to be tonight.

            With a small snap every light in the house went out, and the music cut off with a wilting wrench. 

They whirled to a sudden stop in the blackness.  Elisabeth clutched at him convulsively, and caught her breath in a sob, too startled to cry out.

            There was a long, terrible silence.  Then:

            “Damn,” Rupert said succinctly.  “Must’ve blown a fuse.”

            She wanted to ask him what made him think that, but didn’t trust her voice.

            “I’ll go find the fuse box.  Have you a torch by any chance?”

            He moved a step, but she clung to him.  His hands moved to steady them both.  “Elisabeth….”

            “Wherever you’re going, I’m coming too,” she breathed.

            He paused, and then answered calmly:  “Probably a good idea.  What about that torch?”

            “Sorry,” she murmured, sliding behind him and slipping her hand into the waistband of his slacks.

            “Ah well.”

            “Do you even know where the fuse box is?” she hissed, trying to concentrate on the sound of their voices and not on the horrible way the darkness was pressing upon her vision like a suffocating black washcloth, or on the terrible possibility that the darkness was now hiding the fact that they were not alone.  “Rupert?”  Against her efforts her voice betrayed her.

            “Yes,” he said, “I know where the fuse box is.  It’s out in the corridor by the kitchen.  Not far at all.  We’ll have the lights back on in two ticks.  Don’t worry.”

            She knew then that it had occurred to him that darkness more than anything else plucked at her weaknesses.  _I won’t panic_, she told herself, and shut her eyes, hoping that a darkness of her own making would be less frightening than the utter darkness of the house around them.

            They moved slowly, shuffling together; but her attempts to stay as close to him as possible hampered their movement.  She could feel him stifling his impatience, and in silence they continued to feel their way across the study to the door.

            The wind kicked up again, shaking drops of rain from the nearby trees to the ground; amidst this patter the house shuffled off a few wooden cracks over their heads.  Elisabeth’s breath lanced into her throat in a voiceless scream, and she stopped and clung hard to him.

            “Elisabeth, for heaven’s sake,” Rupert said.

            “I’m sorry,” she whispered back on a sob.  “I can’t help it.”

            She felt him draw a breath, reassuming his patience.  She swallowed hard and took up her courage to follow him as he moved again.

            There was a soft series of cracks that echoed its way toward them; not footsteps, and not even definitely inside the house, but low, almost beneath them.

            He stopped too; and Elisabeth’s breath ended in her throat.

            They waited, but nothing came for them; and they moved on, the sounds of their own footsteps multiplied in whispers across ancient rug and floorboard.

            It seemed to take forever for them to reach the wall of the corridor.  Elisabeth followed him, listening to the sound of his hand slithering along the plaster, seeking, feeling, questing.

            A small clack close at hand, and Elisabeth jumped.  “Found it,” he murmured, and latched the small metal door open.  Mr Greenbill senior had apparently had the good sense to keep an old torch inside the box, for Rupert’s fumbling hands knocked it about, grasped it, and clicked it on.  An egg-yolk weak light flared in her vision.

            “What is it?” she asked, as he trained the light on the dusty column of fuses.

            “Main fuse is all right,” he grunted.  The beam played slowly down the fuses one by one.  “Actually, they’re all good.”  His voice, Elisabeth thought, carried mostly mild puzzlement, tinged with the skepticism born of a twenty-five-year Watcher’s career.  Her hand was growing clammy tucked in his waistband, so she pulled it out to wipe it on her skirt.

            “Any extra fuses?” she asked, forcing herself to be calm.

            “No.  Whatever’s the problem, we won’t solve it tonight.”

            “Then….”

            “I think,” he said with a sigh, “we’d better go home.”

            _Home_.  The small word echoed sadly in Elisabeth’s mind.  In a few short hours she had begun to feel that this might be her home.

            “All right?” he asked her.

            “Yes,” she said, and found to her surprise that it was true.  She was still badly frightened, but the darkness had forced her senses to reach out past the immediate confines of her body, and she was beginning to trust their stunted acuity.

            He clicked off the torch and replaced it in the fuse box.  Elisabeth heard the door latch shut.  “Door’s this way,” he said, and took her arm gently, nudging her in the direction he wanted.

            After shuffling interminably along, Elisabeth brought her hand up instinctively to meet the heavy aged oak of the door, smooth and cool to the touch.  “Ah,” Rupert said.  He nudged her gently aside and felt for the handle.  “Funny,” he said, “I don’t remember locking it.  Ah well.”  He snicked the lock undone, and she felt him grip the handle and pull.

            Nothing happened.

            “Is it stuck?” she quavered, fighting down a fresh sense of suffocation.

            “A bit,” he said.  She felt him edge her further aside with his shoulder so as to take the handle with both hands.  He grunted.  “No joy,” he said.  “Give me a hand.”

            Her hands took a place with his on the cool iron handle, and she braced a foot against the bottom of the wainscot framing the door.

            “Three…two…_one_.”  They pulled.  Elisabeth felt a terrific resistance, as of a great vacuum, holding the door shut, and oddly, rather than succumbing to fresh fear, she felt a cool urge to outdo this unaccountable force.  She braced her foot hard, and pulled afresh:  and all at once the door sucked open on a gout of wind, and she almost fell.  Rupert grasped her roughly and drew her out across the threshold, as if against great pressure, and they stumbled out and down the steps and into the weed-grown flowerbeds of the front garden.  Behind them the door banged hard against the wall, and boomeranged, and clacked home.  As it shut, the wind died again, leaving only the patter of leftover raindrops falling from the trees.

            “Well!” Elisabeth said, echoing Coleridge, with far more humor than that poor Romantic had employed in his dejected ode.  “That’s a very strange wind-tunnel.”

            Rupert merely grunted.  “Let’s hope I have my car keys.  I don’t fancy doing all that over again.”

            Fortunately, he did.  The car started without mishap, and as they pulled out of the lane onto the road, Elisabeth looked back at the house.  It looked no less sympathetic than before, but it seemed very dark.  She was glad to be going away for the night.

 

*

 

Back at the flat, they turned on lights and Elisabeth set down her satchel so she could go into the kitchen.  “Want some tea?”

            “Yes, please.”

            The cat came running to meet them, and spent several minutes sniffing at their shoes and whatever it could reach of their clothing before rubbing against their legs and purring.  Rupert bent and scratched his ears affectionately; he seemed to have forgotten completely cursing the cat the night before.  “We’re glad to see you, too,” Elisabeth said, amused.

            Later, over their tea, Rupert looked at her wryly.  “I’m very sorry.  This is not the ending I had envisioned for the evening.”

            “Our life,” Elisabeth agreed, “definitely has donkey’s ears.  But don’t worry,” she added with a little smile.  “We’ll get there eventually.”

            His face warmed visibly, and he opened his mouth, but the cat interrupted with a  loud cry from over his empty food bowl.

            They both laughed.

 

*

 

They went to bed: bumping around each other to brush their teeth in the bathroom, undressing and hanging clothes in the bulging closet, opening the windows to catch the fresh breeze following the rain.  Elisabeth opted to have all the lights out for once.  Rupert said, when she returned to the dark bedroom:  “I know this will sound condescending, but I realize you were very brave back at the house.”

            “I’d forgotten some of the graces of darkness,” was all she answered.  But when they crawled into bed together, Elisabeth found his hand once more and kissed it.  When she let go, he used it to stroke the contour of her cheek, and as they settled down, it moved to her shoulder, and the backs of his fingers traced upward to the soft underside of her forearm, caressing.

            At her tacit invitation he rose in the bed and bent over her, to kiss her mouth: and she kissed him back.  “I’m,” he murmured, “terribly…sorry….”

            “Shh,” she said.  “Me too.”

            He drew a long breath, and they sighed together, settling in for a long, thorough kiss.

            But after a moment Elisabeth found that kissing him wasn’t precisely the touch she wanted.  In the darkness she broke the kiss and held his face in her hands.  He made a movement as if to protest, or to query; she murmured, “Shh…,” and began to explore his face with patient fingertips.

            “The graces of darkness?” he murmured.  She answered by finding his soft eyelid and closing it.  The aged skin slipped under her touch, loose but still elastic; his eyelashes were long and soft like a child’s, his crow’s feet permanent and joyful, his eyebrow coarse and gently bushed.  With slow hands she explored the creases of his brow and the beginnings of a soft wattle under his chin and the strength of his jawline and the smooth mobility of his lips, the chiseled definition of chin, philtrum, and nostril.  His lips opened under her hand to draw a breath, and when her palm moved to conform to his proud cheekbone, it slipped on a smooth wet place.  She drew in a sharp breath.

            They were still a moment; then silently she moved both hands in the darkness to cup his face for a moment before moving beneath him to turn them over.

            Now he lay on his back, and she stroked her hands down to his shoulders and dipped to taste the planes of his chest, touching now with sensitive lips rather than fingers.  In the grace of darkness she found coarse male hair; a tight, hard nipple (she paused to smile); old scars; soft belly; moving down and down.

            Her hand pushed down the covers over his thighs, and found him already naked.  She stroked his thigh, a movement of preparation for the thing she was going to do next: it had not been her original plan, but it seemed right, and she bent to prime him with a kiss to the hollow of his hip, saving the last, perfect contact for an exquisitely prolonged moment.  A hard shiver went all the way through him, and he warmed under her touch.

            At the appointed time he gave voice to a strong, extended moan, perfect in its helplessness, and she cradled his hips and set about to make him do it again.  On other, previous, occasions, his unwonted loudness during this particular act of their repertoire had startled and consequently slightly annoyed her; but now, in the darkness that had faded to accommodate the faint streetlight beyond the bedroom curtains, she closed her eyes and redoubled her efforts, without any more reserve.

            When at last it was finished, she lay her head on his belly and recovered her equilibrium, swallowing hard.  His hand wandered down and buried itself in her hair, stroking her scalp gratefully.  She suddenly felt turned inside out with what could only be love for him: she raised her head, and at his silent invitation, squirmed upward to curl against him, with her face pressed safely under the lee of his jaw.

            His hand, meanwhile, wandered down her body, seeking to reciprocate; but she intercepted it with one of hers and clasped it upon the broad curve of his chest, which rose and fell with his breathing.  He freed himself gently, and began to explore the contours of her hand as she had done with his face.  Slowly:  slowly, his fingertips, large and ineffably male compared to hers but equally sensitive, traced her small nail-beds, the tag of skin that was going to be a sharp hangnail next her thumb, the wrinkles of each knuckle one by one, the down of hair and the softly raised veins on the back.

            The slow warmth she had gathered to herself while ministering to him flared blazing to life, and her breath quickened, then quickened again when he turned her hand over to find his way to its soft underside.  His touch brushed the creases of her wrist, the line of her thumb, the soft puffs of flesh under each finger; and then, with the same inerrancy she had used to him, his own thumb pressed gently into the heart of her palm.

            She jerked, tingling, and lost her breath completely.  As he stroked her palm over and over, the power swept slowly through her and expired in a soft, shuddering moan; and she was left limp in his embrace.

            She recovered enough to lift her head and kiss his bare shoulder, before subsiding to rest against him, and drift toward sleep in the rain-cooled air.

            “What a day it’s been,” she murmured, eyes closed.

            He hummed an inarticulate agreement, and they both relaxed at last.

 

*

 

In the morning Rupert rose and dressed early.  He tried not to wake Elisabeth, and was so far fortunate that she merely murmured and turned over, her long limp hair drifting over her face.  He smoothed it out of the way, whispered to her lightly-sleeping face, “I’ll be back later,” and let himself quietly out of the flat.

            The rain had returned during the night, but now the sky was clearing again, leaving the pavements glittering wet and every outdoor surface washed and beaded with water.  He kept his pace quick but measured, and paused only for traffic.

            The city was already awake, bells chiming, people dodging here and there, voices rising in greeting or hawking or irritation at the traffic.  Rupert kept moving, and his steady pace brought him very quickly to his destination.

            He glanced across the street at the vicarage, decided it was late enough, and went ahead into the church.  The receptionist glanced up.  “Ah, Mr. Giles,” she said.  “Good morning to you.  A relief to have the rain, eh?”

            “Indeed,” Rupert said politely.  “Is the vicar in?”

            “Oh, yes, oh yes.  Go on up.”

            Rupert went up.  At the open door to the vicar’s office, he paused to knock at the doorframe.

            Anne Langland turned and saw him.  “Rupert.  An unexpected pleasure.  I hope you are well.”  She moved from the small table where she had been making herself tea, and added more water to the electric kettle, with the same air of unruffled professionalism that had marked his admiration for a few select Watchers, and of course, in her best moments, for Buffy.

            As the water heated she turned to him again, with her head cocked in that unthreatening shrewd gaze he had learned to trust, though it never did make him comfortable.  “Something’s wrong,” she said.  “What has happened?  Were you unable to purchase the house?”

            He brightened a very little.  “No,” he said.  “I signed the last paper yesterday.  It’s officially mine now.  I took Elisabeth to see it last night.”

            “Then is it as you feared?  Does she not share your enthusiasm for the place?”

            “No,” he said sadly.  “No, I’m not worried about that anymore.  She’s tired and stressed; it’s nothing to do with the house.  I think she really loves it.”

            A faint pursed line of humor came into Mother Anne’s smile.  “Then whatever it is, for heaven’s sake sit down and take your tea.  If it’s not Elisabeth, and it’s not the house, then it must be something new, and we have a bit of a conversation ahead of us.”  Sheepishly Rupert sat down in her guest chair, and she handed him the tea she had originally prepared for herself.

            “I’m afraid it is the house, though,” he nerved himself to say at last, and followed it up with a longish sip of tea.

            “Oh?”

            He waited till Anne had finished doctoring the second cup and taken it round to her desk chair, where she sat comfortably and raised the cup to her lips.

            “Yes,” Rupert said, swallowing.  “I’d hoped my earlier misgivings were false…but it seems…well, last night I received a bit of a confirmation that….”  He stopped and raised his eyes to her face.  She sat waiting.

            “I’m afraid the house has been cursed,” Rupert said miserably.

            The priest did not ruffle easily, but Rupert thought he was reading correctly the lift of her posture in a sigh and the wry turn of her mouth.

            “Oh, dear,” Anne Langland said.


	3. Wall, Wainscot, and Mouse

_And the ragged rock in the restless waters,_

_Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;_

_On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,_

_In navigable weather it is always a seamark_

_To lay a course by: but in the sombre season_

_Or the sudden fury, is what it always was._

—T.S. Eliot,_ Four Quartets_

 

_“Most of it’s junk,” _ _Willow_ _ said._

_            She dropped the half-rolled pile of mail on the kitchen table and plopped down in one of the chairs, pulling her sweatshirt in and out from her front.  “It’s sticky out there.”_

_            The sweatshirt had actually belonged to him once, but he had let her raid the clothing he kept here for extra things without actually verbalizing the suggestion.  Willow had packed for England extremely impractically:  he suspected the only part of her who cared what she wore was also the part expecting to be hauled up before some mystical tribunal for a capital trial, in which case one wants to look one’s best.  Hanging out on a farm between in-depth magical lessons, however, was very hard on diaphanous shirts and dresses, even ones made with all-natural fibers._

_            Willow left off fanning herself and, without waiting for Rupert to answer, began to sort desultorily through the pile of mail she had retrieved.  Neither of them much expected answers from the other: words were dull, and the silences had a proliferating amount of flavors, none of which were particularly welcome.  But there was nothing they could do about that._

_            “But, oh, hey.  Letter from Elisabeth.”  _ _Willow_ _ fished out the blue envelope from the scatter of circulars and adverts.  “Here you go.”_

_            Rupert eyed the letter as she held it out to him across the table.  Willow was trying to look him in the eye, but he held out for a few moments before meeting her gaze briefly and reaching to take it.  But instead of opening it, he put it down on the island and went to pour himself some more coffee.  What he really wanted was a good, deeply-aged scotch, warmish and neat; but that would wreak havoc with his careful defenses, and he needed those.  So coffee it was._

_            “I’m not going to read over your shoulder, you know.”_

_            He stopped and put the coffee pot down to look not quite at her.  He couldn’t take the letter away to read now without betraying to self-evidence the fact they had been so assiduously ignoring: that he was desperate to guard his privacy against her, desperate enough to pretend that he wanted Elisabeth to come without also wanting her to protect him from Willow.  It was foolish of him to have ever pretended he could hide that from Elisabeth; equally foolish to keep up this charade._

_            He opened the letter._

_            Among other things, it said:  _You do realize, don’t you, that my presence might open you up to her more than you want?  I can’t take responsibility for that.  I just wanted to make sure you know it, and I’m cowardly enough that I have to write it in a letter rather than calling you.  And I tend to think that no amount of preparation is ever enough for what comes, but one does try anyway, doesn’t one?__

_            “She’s coming here,” Rupert said to _ _Willow_ _.  “Next week.  For a short visit.”_

_            “Oh,” _ _Willow_ _ said._

_            Another little silence, with another new flavor._

_            “Okay,” _ _Willow_ _ said._

 

*

 

“Well,” Anne Langland said, setting her teacup down, “that is certainly distressing news.  How very disappointing for you.  Do you think the curse is removable?”

            “I hope so,” Rupert said.  He took a fortifying sip of his tea.

            The priest frowned.  “Rupert…are you by any chance applying to me for my services as a priest?  Because I have to tell you that I’ve never performed an exorcism—I don’t have that gift—nor am I really in touch with priests who have.  And I daresay you’ve employed your own methods for such things in the past.”

            “Many times,” Rupert said colorlessly.

            “Then….”

            It was her straight practical and spiritual advice he wanted, but he didn’t know quite how to ask for it, so he remained silent.

            Anne seemed to realize this, for she picked up her teacup again and inquired, “Does Elisabeth share your suspicions about the nature of this curse?”

            “Well,” Rupert said uncomfortably, “she hasn’t said anything to indicate—”

            But Anne interrupted.  “Do you mean to tell me,” she said, “that you haven’t discussed the curse with her?”

            “Well….”

            She fixed him with a severe look, but he must have looked as pitiful as he felt, because she subsided against the back of her chair and said, with a touch of amusement:  “I see.  So it is about both the house _and_ Elisabeth.”

            “That’s about the size of it,” Rupert confessed.

            “Perhaps you’d better tell me what happened,” she said.

            Rupert did.  He left out nothing:  his growing realization that his fanciful idea that the house was talking to him was not all in his mind; the shadows where no shadows should be; the odd matte silences that overtook him even though he knew Elisabeth was making noise with books a room away; and last night’s aborted attempt at celebration, with the lights and music cut off as if by guillotine, Elisabeth too instantly saturated in fear to do anything but cling to him, their struggle to escape by the front door….

            Anne had let her gaze rest to the side, in the middle distance, while he spoke; but now she looked at him directly.  “When did Elisabeth recover her self-possession?”

            He thought about it, but couldn’t pin it down.  “She made a joke when we got outside, I do remember that.”

            “Did she lose control while you were inside, in the dark?”

            “Never,” Rupert admitted.  “She was very frightened, but she mastered it.  Almost the entire time.”

            Anne was silent for a long moment, and the thing she had wanted him to see clicked into place despite his struggles.  From there, he saw even further, to another fear he had not voiced even to himself.  “She’s not going to leave me over the house,” he said at last, as if hoping to make it unalterably true by asserting it.

            “But you’re afraid of that.”

            Rupert found himself unable to speak.

            “Or—you’re afraid of some overwhelming reason for her to leave coming on the scene, and this might be the one.”

            Rupert always hated this part of coming to visit Anne, the way she turned him inside out, however matter-of-factly, then returned him to his proper state, dusted him off, and sent him on his way.  It was precisely what he came for, but that didn’t mean he had to like it.

            “How much older are you than she?” Anne asked.

            He hadn’t expected this question, but nevertheless it touched a forgotten bruise.  “Twenty years,” he answered.

            “Twenty years,” she repeated.  “This did not, however, prevent you forming a full-blown partnership with her.”

            “No,” he said.

            “Have any irreconcilable differences in outlook or mindset arisen from this difference?”

            He thought about it, dimly aware that she was getting at something important and he needed to answer as accurately as possible.  “Cultural differences,” he said; “generational culture, I mean, as well as national.  But those are…superficial, really.  No more an obstacle to cooperation than my differences with my other friends from California.”

            “Or than your differences with the Slayer.”

            “I was including Buffy in that latter group,” Rupert said austerely.

            “Hmm,” was all Anne replied for a moment.  She took another sip of her tea and put down the cup; reached for a pen and uncapped it one-handed, then recapped it in a reversal of the same motion of her hand.  The pen made a small click, then another, in the silence of the office.

            “How is your relationship with Buffy, at the moment, if I may inquire?” she asked him mildly.

            “Oh, much as usual,” Rupert said, with as much lightness as he could muster.

            “And what is usual?” Anne asked.

            “A diplomatic minefield,” Rupert said, before he could stop himself.  “But not,” he added, “completely unpredictable, so it’s not as if there are a _great_ many quarrels.”

            “But you’d hardly describe your usual relationship by talking mainly about quarrels, I suspect, unless there had been a recent one.” Click; click, went the pen.

            Rupert tipped up his chin, and his free hand came up to tuck itself under the other elbow.  “I’m not really interested in talking about it,” he said, with a light voice of warning that frightened him more than it frightened her.

            “As you wish.” Anne let her gaze wander off once more.  The silence lingered, but Rupert did not take the bait.

            “To get back to Elisabeth and the house,” Anne said at last, without returning her gaze to him, “would you consider an insurmountable problem to lie more in the future, or in the past?”

            “Is this the part where I confide that I didn’t get enough love in my childhood?” Rupert said dryly.

            “The past, then,” Anne said, equally dryly.

            Rupert winced.  “A touch, a touch, I do confess’t.”  Elisabeth must be rubbing off on him, he thought.

            Anne gave him a genuine smile.

            “Things can reach critical mass, you know,” he said, earnest at last.  “There’s only so much overcoming one can do.”

            “Yes,” Anne said, “I think that is very apt—critical mass.  I think, though, that if things reach that point, the focus usually narrows to a freer decision.  No less frightening, of course, but freer.”

            Rupert understood what she meant.  But he couldn’t bear to contemplate what decision that might have to be, so he merely glossed the meaning and sat waiting for her to continue.

            “But this,” Anne said, “is not that time, I don’t think.”

            Rupert shook his head, vaguely relieved.

            “Well, then,” she said, letting go the pen and rising with her teacup.  “I expect you’ve got a lot to do.  Exorcisms, as I understand it, require a hefty amount of research.”

            “But—”  Rupert wasn’t ready for her to let him go; he hadn’t got the advice he had come for.  “What am I to do?”

            Anne turned from the table, a quick, controlled motion.  “I should have thought that obvious,” she said, with a trace of irritation that instantly put starch in his spine.  “Go _home_ and tell Elisabeth everything you just told me.”

            “Right,” he said, and rose chastened to hand her his teacup.

 

*

 

He was on his way to do exactly what Anne had told him, except his trouser pocket exploded with “Für Elise” in the street, instantly triggering the schizophrenic shift to his other life.  He dug out the mobile and opened it.  The luminous screen said, “Buffy.”

            “Hello?” he said, managing to put the broadest-possible put-upon note into the word.

            “Giles, if I know you you’re not _actually_ in the middle of anything, so don’t give me that.”

            “How do you know that?  I happen to be on my way to planning an exorcism on my new house.”  He hadn’t planned to blurt that out, but it seemed to work on a tactical level, because Buffy backed down.

            “Oh,” she said.  “That sucks.  Is it bad?”

            “Not yet,” he said, with an edge to his voice.  “What’s up?”

            “I need you to go to London.”

 

*

 

Elisabeth answered her phone at home with a sleepy sigh.  “Hello?”

            “’Lis’beth?  It’s me.”

            “Rupert?”  She broke off to give a prolonged yawn.  “Sorry.  Haven’t had my tea yet.”

  

  1. I’ve got to go to London.”
  



            “Oh yeah?  Something up?”

            “Oh, nothing disastrous, except as it involves Andrew.”

            “Mm—I forgot.  Wasn’t he supposed to be here by now?”

            “It seems there’s a difficulty with his passport.  Something about an outstanding warrant for an armored truck robbery.  I ask you.”

            Elisabeth started to snicker.

            “Don’t tell me it’s true,” Rupert said.  “Buffy didn’t say, and I’m trying very hard not to care.”

            “Well, what can your going to London do about it?”

            “Willow did a glamour on the passport authorities in the States—something else I’m not inquiring about—but neglected to do the same for Interpol.  So when Andrew applied for a visa here, his name naturally came up with a flag.  Willow fixed the records after the fact, but they’re still being unaccountably suspicious, so I’m supposed to go and vouch for the boy in the right office.  I’ll be back by dinnertime.  I hope.”  Rupert quickened his pace toward the train station.

            “Okay,” Elisabeth said.  “I’ll see you then.  I’m going to do my work at home today.”

            “Right,” he said.  “And—Elisabeth?”

            “Yeah?”

            “There are—some things—I need to talk to you about later.  Don’t let me forget.”

            She was silent a moment, but he couldn’t interpret it before she said:  “Yeah, sure thing.  I’ll make a mental note.”

            “Right then.  I’ll call you later.”

            Rupert closed the call and put the mobile phone back into his pocket.  He oughtn’t to feel a sense of reprieve, but he couldn’t properly resent this fool’s errand on Andrew Wells’s behalf.  A trip to London was just what he needed to get a little breathing space.  Perspective, that was what he wanted.  And possibly a neat scotch.

            He tried not to think about his house at all.

 

*

 

At home, Elisabeth showered, dressed, ate, and sat down to her laptop with her notes from the day before.  She wasn’t at all looking forward to this slog.  She had never quite been able to free herself from that suspicion, played upon by the First, that she was playing baby games with academia; and she had not yet figured out how to have a sense of humor about it.  There was a trick to it, she knew; if you kept plugging away maybe it would fall into place.

            But she hadn’t any patience for the slog today.

            She wondered where Rupert had gone so early in the morning.  Had he gone out to the house, to clean up their abandoned picnic?  She got up and went to look out the window.  No, his car was still there; so one could presume he’d walked to the train station to leave for London.  He’d been in town, then, somewhere, doing something.  Elisabeth felt no jealousy of Rupert’s time, but she did wonder if there was something she ought to be worrying about.  There was the presence of a worry niggling at the back of her consciousness, and she wasn’t sure which way to look to bring it into focus.

            Perhaps, she thought, staring across the room at her messy desk, _she_ should go out to clean up the picnic.  Maybe being in Rupert’s beloved house would give her an angle on the matter; after all, she had never actually been inside it alone, for Rupert had always opted to come with her when she went to catalogue Greenbill senior’s library.  There was definitely something creepy about what had happened last night, but Rupert hadn’t said anything about it, and if she went during broad afternoon, there was at least no chance of being plunged in darkness willy-nilly.  She’d be careful, and she’d take her cell-phone.

            Perspective, that was what she wanted.

            She would go to the house after lunch.

 

*

 

Elisabeth found herself approaching Pyke’s Lea with an increasing flutter in her nerves as Rupert’s car trundled bumpily over the gravel lane.  She set the parking brake and turned off the engine, her hands tingling almost painfully.

            _What’s the matter with you?_ she admonished herself.  _It’s a house.  Whatever’s creepy about it can be taken care of._

            She checked her pockets—cell-phone, check; vial of holy water (a whim), check; the housekey the Greenbill had given her, check—and made her approach to the front door.  If she remembered right, she wouldn’t even need the key; the door had slammed shut, but they had made no attempt to lock it.

            And so it was.  Elisabeth pushed open the door and peered in for a moment before crossing the threshold.  The house in daylight was as sympathetic as it had been the night before, when she had looked back at it on leaving; and it had that same lonely air, an air of someone rather resigned to having secrets that lost their excitement with every passing year.

            Elisabeth crossed the threshold, being careful to push the heavy door all the way open and out of the path of any stray drafts that might shut it.

            The lights were still out.  It occurred to Elisabeth that perhaps there had been a power outage; she wished she had thought to call the electric company and check.  At the very least Rupert ought to have them send a guy; if the wiring was bad, he needed to know sooner rather than later.

            She went directly to the study, noting on her way the fuse box that had sat tucked in a shadow of the corridor, hidden in plain sight.  Rupert was the one with the eye for detail, at least about general surroundings, not her.  Occasionally Elisabeth gave in to a pang of envy against Rupert about this sort of thing:  she was thirty years old and probably wouldn’t ever have that general air of utter competence—and whatever you could say about Rupert’s faults, mediocrity wasn’t one of them.  She was very ashamed of her snivelling behavior the night before.  None of Rupert’s other compatriots were like that.  Xander may have said he hid from danger, but he had taken an immediate opportunity to shove himself into dark places after Buffy.  Willow, even Willow at her youngest and most vulnerable, wasn’t abjectly afraid of the dark.  When confronted with surroundings completely possessed, Dawn threw herself at the evil with all the passion at her disposal.

            She was in the study doorway, looking at the remains of their abandoned picnic, as if the scene had been left by someone other than herself and Rupert.

            Perspective.  She had been right; it was to be found here.

            She crossed to the blankets and picked up the wine glasses first.  Hers had a little left; the sides of the glass were stained purple where the wine had settled below its original level.  Rupert’s had large male fingerprints across the bottom of the bowl, just above the stem.  With a small inward shudder of pleasure she remembered the drift of his hand exploring hers in the darkness the night before: a much better thing to remember about his fingerprints than the black ones he had left across her wrist a few months before.  Before, when the First Evil had saturated their thoughts and living spaces.

            Elisabeth shook off the memory and tipped back the last dry swallow of wine, then packed the wineglasses in the basket.

            After the wineglasses went the near-empty bottle of wine.  Then the olives and pickles, the sandwich crusts, the empty custard ramekins, the leftover hunk of French bread, the drying cheddar, the silverware, the napkins.

            Now all that was left was the crumbs on the blanket.  Elisabeth got up and gathered the blanket into her arms, to shake it outside the French doors onto the tiny roofed porch that looked onto the overgrown back garden.

            She didn’t see the odd shadow follow her in the ancient mirror over the mantel.

            When she came back in with the blanket, she left the French doors open too.  No sense in closing up an escape route, if she needed one.  She folded the blanket and the one that had been under it, and put it in the pile with the other two they had brought in but never used.  She paused a moment to look around:  yes, this would have been a delicious place to make love—the painted ceiling, the quality of light, the homely grandeur, the bookshelves.  They would get around to it eventually, she hoped.

            The house was quiet around her.  Elisabeth thought she could learn to love a life she made here: this place was broad and ancient, dignified and yet slightly rough around the edges.  Much like Rupert himself, really: and she already loved him.

            Elisabeth let out a sigh and bent to pick up the picnic basket.  She’d gotten perspective, but no answers.  Perhaps the answers would come later, when she understood the question.  Meanwhile she’d take home the picnic basket, and leave the other things to pick up later, or use as they needed them.

            All at once the lights came up, feeble in the daylight, and the music unswallowed its sound.

            Elisabeth jumped a full centimeter off the floor and let out a small yelp.  The picnic basket rattled on the floor where she had nearly lifted it up, only to snatch her hand away at the sudden sound.

            “Dammit,” Elisabeth breathed, pressing at her chest as if to smooth down her heart rate.  “_Now_ they get the power back on.  I really need to make that call.”  She stood, breathing slowly and absorbing the sensual jazz as it played in the daylight.  It was no longer in the least a sexy sound.  “It’s a good thing we weren’t stuck here last night.”

            As if in answer, the French doors swung deliberately (but too quickly for her to leap over and stop them) shut.

            Now, instead of jumping into the air, Elisabeth stood very still.  In the distance, down the corridor, she heard the front door swing heavily, creaking, and shut with a clack.

            “Ohhh, shit,” Elisabeth said, very softly.

 

*

 

By the time Rupert wrangled his way out of several officially-carpeted offices and out onto the street, he had decided he would _much_ rather be at home having a painful heart-to-heart with Elisabeth.  He took out his mobile and checked for messages; none.  He toyed with the idea of calling Buffy and declaring his mission accomplished, but decided against it and put his mobile back in his pocket.

            He checked his watch.  He had got done quickly enough to have time for a quick one before catching the slow train back to Oxford.  Discussing the house with Elisabeth, even if Anne was right and it wasn’t the bogey he had feared, still required lubrication.

            He changed course slightly and made for a nearby pub he knew.

 

*

 

_What the hell_, Elisabeth thought.  _Why not try politeness?_

            She crossed to the boombox and clicked off the music.  Then she stood up and cleared her throat.  “Um…excuse me?  Could you open the doors, please?”

            At first, nothing.  Then a slow creak out in the hall told her the front door was opening.

            So, a friendly haunt.  Or, at least one whose respect could be earned.  Possibly.  Elisabeth picked up the picnic basket and tried not to hurry her steps toward the front door.

            She had just entered the foyer, looking out on the front garden and cheerful daylight, when the door slammed quickly shut.

            “Ah ha ha,” Elisabeth said.  “Ah hahahaha.  That was really funny.”  She stopped in the foyer entry, swinging her picnic basket with faux cheer.  “Really great joke,” she said, louder.

            Then all the lights went out again.

            “Stupidity,” Elisabeth muttered, “thy name is Bowen.”

            She decided that there was no point hanging around in the front of the house if all the ghost (if that was what it was) was going to do was open the door and shut it, playing keep-away with her freedom.  So she took self and basket back into the study.

            “You know,” she said, “I’ve never had the impression that you’re anything but a nice house.  What’s with the hauntiness all of a sudden?”

            The music clicked back on, soft warm brass mixing with the warm daylight.

            She turned it back off and took out the tape.  “Sorry,” she said.  “I only dance with people I know.”  There was nothing to stop this…thing from putting the tape back in once she put it down.  Or strangling her with the tape’s guts.  Elisabeth shuddered and put the tape on the floor.  This was not going to end well, whether she channeled Buffy’s bravado or not.

            But nothing happened.  Elisabeth waited.  After a moment she thought she saw a shadow out of the corner of her eye, but when she moved it wasn’t there.

            “Okay,” she said, “we can do the metaphorical dance thing.  Only, if you write ‘DIE’ in blood on the wall, that’ll be really, really lame.”  _Of course_, she thought, _ghosts are famous for having a really lame sense of humor, so what have I just done?_

            DIE did not appear in blood on the wall.  Elisabeth almost wished it would.  She slipped a hand inside the placket of her jersey shirt and gripped her cross.  “So, uh, what’s your deal, anyway?  Did you die here, or what?  Are you a ghost?”

            No answer, unless a distant whistle of wind outside the French doors was an answer.

            _Why the hell am I talking to this thing? _Elisabeth thought.  _What am I, M. Night Shyamalan?_

            She turned around, just as the tape flung itself at her face.  She brought up an awkward hand just in time to stop it cracking the lens of her glasses.  It dropped to the floor at her feet and stayed there.

            “This is rapidly ceasing to amuse,” Elisabeth said, reaching for her cross again.

            Suddenly the French doors blew open and a great gust of wind rushed at where Elisabeth stood, picnic basket in one hand, cross in the other.  The fresh air should have lifted her spirits, but instead it seemed to carry a hidden staleness, a dirtiness that touched her soul in a way that was horribly familiar….

            She didn’t even try for the escape when the doors slammed shut again, cracking one of the lower panes.

            _Know anybody who might be interested in this white elephant?_ Mr Greenbill mocked in her mind.

            “Oh, so, stupid,” Elisabeth murmured.  “Why did I not see it all before?  And Rupert….”

            Rupert must have known.  You don’t get to be an old Watcher if you don’t know.

            And he was in London.

            Elisabeth thought of her cell-phone, then wondered if this was the evil’s plan: to get them all suckered into entering the pitcher plant, one by one.  Not that this was her primary worry.  She had to get herself to a safe space.

            Shadows started weaving themselves across the ceiling, then whirling about the room.  Nothing else moved, but Elisabeth had the sense of a gathering energy.  _Ohh, this is not at all going to be fun_, she thought.  And there was no safe space in the house, that she knew.

            Maybe she could make one.  People in these situations drew circles to shelter in, didn’t they?  But she didn’t have anything holy.  No, wait, she did.  Holy water.

            Holy water.  A picnic basket with…a small remnant of red wine, some olives, and a hunk of bread.

            Bread, water, wine.

            “Oh, gosh,” she muttered.  “Talk about lame.  This is never going to work.”

            Air was moving inside the house now.  Elisabeth’s hair stirred on her shoulders.  Well, nothing to lose.

            She took out the bottle of wine and uncorked it with her teeth, then poured it out in a thin dribble around her on the faded rug, her thumb over the lip to control the flow.  She used no words:  however ineffective a Eucharistic circle might be, she had no intention of debasing the elements for a ghost she didn’t know.  She put down the basket inside the circle and took out the bread.  It had dried enough that she could easily crumble it and drop it in bits around the same circle as the wine.

            “Right,” she murmured.  “Wine, bread….”

            As she took out the holy water the breeze rose to a gusting wind.  Her hair flew up and obscured her vision, twisting and lifting.  She brushed it roughly out of the way and poured a thin stream of holy water all around the circle.

            Her hair fell free to her shoulders.  Elisabeth looked around her:  the edges of the lightest blanket in the pile several feet away were still flapping madly, and the fraying parts of the carpet trembled.  But inside her circle everything was still.

            “You’ve got to be kidding,” Elisabeth said.  “It _worked?_”

            If it worked, then probably she’d be able to use her cell-phone without the ghost screwing with the transmission.  She took it out and sat down on the carpet inside the circle.  Pitcher-plant or no, she had a phone call to make.

 

*

 

Rupert had been very good.  He’d had the quick one, and then a slow one, and then he had stopped.  And now he was riding, in full possession of his faculties, out of the station on his way to Oxford, with time to spare.

            His mobile went off in his trousers.  Rupert was really starting to actively hate “Für Elise.”  He squirmed in his seat and dug out the little phone, expecting to see “Buffy” on the screen.

            It said, “Elisabeth—mobile.”

            He opened the phone curiously.  “Yeees?” he said, pleasantly.

            “Rupert,” Elisabeth said, with that false buoyant cheer that instantly boded no good. 

He groaned inwardly.  “Yes?”

“So,” she said sweetly.  “When exactly were you going to tell me that the house is haunted?”

            Damn.  She’d figured it out, and before he’d had the chance to broach the subject himself.  “Um…er…well, you know, my dear, I had planned to discuss it with you this morning, but I was called off on this errand to London.  Really, I had planned to talk with you about the house before now, it’s just….” He stopped; that line of excuse wasn’t going anywhere.  “Look, I’m on the train back to Oxford.  Why don’t I pick you up and we’ll get some Indian takeaway and hash it all out?  Where are you?”

            There was a dead silence that lasted ten seconds before the penny dropped.

            “Ohhh,” Rupert said softly.  “Oh dear.”

            She still said nothing, but he could practically feel her giving him a scathing look.

            He said, faintly:  “Can you get out?”

            “Nnooo-oo,” Elisabeth said, giving him the full-barreled you-dumbass tone.

            “Oh God,” Rupert said.  “Wh-what are you doing there?”

            “What do you _mean_, what am I doing here?  I came here to pick up the picnic.  You could warn a girl, you know.  This isn’t Mr McGregor’s garden.  All you would’ve had to say was, ‘Elisabeth, dearest, the house is gone around the twist.  Stay away till we figure out what to—”

            “No,” he cut in, “I mean, what are you doing to protect yourself?”

            “I made a circle,” she said, “with bread and wine and holy water.”

            He blinked.  “Bread and wine, and—”

            “It’s what I had on hand, okay?”

            “Right.  Well, is it working?”

            “Seems to be.”

            “What’s happening?”

            “Lots of wind and shadows and crazy shit like that.  Rupert, I hope you don’t mind my saying this isn’t my idea of fun.”

            “I’m sorry,” he said miserably.  “Look, stay in the circle.  Don’t let anything tempt you out of it.”

            Elisabeth snorted generously, but he could hear the tremor in her breathing.

            “I’ll make some calls.  There’s got to be somebody nearer than I am who can get you out of there.”

            She was silent.

            “You there?  You all right?”

            “Yes,” she said, her voice shaking a little.

            “Right.  Stay in the circle.  I’ll get help.”

            He clicked off the call, and thumbed around shakily for Buffy’s number.

            “Giles,” she said instantly on answering.  “How did it go?”

            “Nevermind bloody Andrew,” Rupert said.  “Elisabeth is trapped in my house, and I’m trapped on a bloody train that’s barely breaking fifty, thanks to you.”

            “What’s Elisabeth doing in your house?” Buffy demanded, as if Elisabeth were deficient.

            “She went to clear up our picnic,” he groaned.

            “Doesn’t she know better than to go to a haunted house alone?”  And when Rupert didn’t answer her, she added, “Or didn’t you tell her?”

            “I meant to tell her when I got home, but instead I got called off on this—”

            “Giles, what is your major malfunction?  What was stopping you from picking up your cell-phone and saying, ‘Hey, honey, don’t go to the house today, it’s kinda haunty?’  I’m not taking responsibility for your stupidity.  Why are you calling me anyway?  It’s not like I’m closer to the house than you are.”

            Rupert very nearly hung up on her.  But instead he sat and breathed for a minute before enunciating hoarsely:  “I’m stuck—on a bloody—train.”

            Buffy heaved a sigh.  “I can call Willow.  D’you want me to call Willow?  I can do that.”

            “Please,” he said tightly.

            “Right,” Buffy said, and clicked off.

            As galling as it was to admit it, Buffy was right:  he should have told Elisabeth about the house before he left.  And now all he could do was sit trembling in his seat and wait till he could get free to help her.

            Convulsively Rupert flipped open his mobile and started thumbing through the menu.

 

*

 

The house seemed to have figured out that Elisabeth couldn’t be touched.  That didn’t mean, however, that she couldn’t still be scared to death.

            From her seated position on the floor she couldn’t quite see what it was trying to show her in the mirror over the mantel—shadows flitted wildly in the glass, with no corresponding shadows on the opposing wall, and she thought she saw a figure, ill-defined, cross the corner.  The maw of the fireplace darkened beyond normal absence of light, and a patter of crackles, like small footsteps, or wildfire, raced across the ceiling over her head.

            But nothing really scared her until the burning started.

            The study walls tanned and broiled before her eyes; then dark spots grew like some necrotic disease; then the burns spread over the walls until all around her was ribbed and charred….

            “No!” she cried, unable to stop herself.

            The paint peeled and cracked on the ceiling, turning briefly beautiful and giving her a glimpse of what might have been before crumbling in on itself and flaking to the floor all around her circle.  The bookshelves, with their beautiful carved edges, developed water damage and sagged, rotten, with a chorus of groans.

            “It’s just a glamour,” she told herself, gripping her cross.  As if to prove it to herself, she shook her head and blinked hard.

            The glamour disappeared, as if a dimensional shift had erased the damage sideways.  The world seemed to live on a slant for one precise moment before righting itself and starting the process of dissolution all over again.

            This time it wasn’t the illusion of destruction that frightened her: it was the all-too-familiar sense of unreality plucking at the edges of her vision.  For a flash of a moment she was back in the infirmary, raving about shadows and mirrors; then she was back in the house again, gripping the carpet for dear life, a small animal cry issuing from her throat.

            Over and over again the study destroyed itself around her; over and over she felt the vague half-loss of security that presaged a visit from her mirror image, so that she almost longed for the First to actually appear and remove the suspense.

            She didn’t know how long this went on before there was a sharp rapping, interrupting her locked battle of minds with the house.  She whirled from her sitting position to look at the French doors.

            On the other side of the warped glass panes was a woman.

            She startled almost to her feet.  Was this another glamour?  Was this a neighbor who knew nothing of the house’s state, who would possibly think her a trespasser and certainly think her mad, sitting in a circle of bread crumbs on the floor?

            The woman held up a quick hand, signaling her to stay put.  She reached for the door handle.

            “No, don’t come in here!” Elisabeth called, as the wind in the house rose again to a shriek.

            Elisabeth wasn’t sure she understood what the woman was doing, but the door suddenly flung itself open and banged back against the wall.  “It’s all right,” the woman said, in the most cheerful and normal voice in the world.  She lifted a hand, and a pool of daylight spread on the floor toward her.

            Elisabeth stayed where she was, staring suspiciously.  Was this an incarnation of the First?  “I’m not leaving the circle,” she told the woman.

            The pitch of the house’s shriek rose as the light invaded the study.

            “You can follow the light to the door,” the woman said.

            Elisabeth raised her voice above the wind.  “How do I know I can trust you?”

            “You don’t.”

            This in itself was not enough to decide her.  But Rupert was on a train somewhere and his house was destroying and remaking itself and her mind was complicit with the evil and there was increasingly no point in staying put.

            Elisabeth rose swaying, like a toddler learning to walk.  She stood in her circle, eyes on where the pool of light was reaching to her, as if biding the moment to jump into a pair of swinging double-dutch ropes.  She looked up:  the woman was not, like the First in some of its incarnations, immaculate—she looked quite ordinary.  Didn’t mean she was safe, but—

            Elisabeth grabbed the handle of the picnic basket—no way in hell was she leaving what she came for—and broke for the door.  Outside the circle, the gale nearly blew her off course and into the shadows, but she flung herself onward, her hair whipping into her eyes, her glasses slipping, her stomach roiling, until she was over the threshold, and the woman withdrew into the back garden with her.

            The French door slammed shut, and everything went quiet.  Elisabeth stood panting, with the sun warm on her shoulders and tranquil birdsong in her ears, and stared back at the house.  Through the panes everything inside looked perfectly normal.  “It _was_ a glamour, then,” she uttered in a half-breath.

            “Pretty standard,” said the woman.

            Elisabeth turned to her.  “Who are you?”

            “Susan Burnwell.  Member of a coven that meets in Devon,” she said briskly.  “But I’ve a cottage in the Chilterns and I happened to be near enough here that when I got word from Miss Rosenberg it didn’t take much doing to get here.  You’re Rupert Giles’s partner.”  It wasn’t a question.

            The woman wasn’t wearing a stitch of all-natural, organically-dyed, free-trade fibers.  She was wearing wide-legged jeans and an absolutely normal white cardigan.  Her silver hair was cut like Princess Diana’s.

            “…Willow called you?” Elisabeth said belatedly.

            Susan Burnwell, who had been observing Elisabeth’s study of her appearance with amusement, replied with a smile.  “Yes.  As I understand it, Mr Giles called the Slayer, who called Miss Rosenberg, who then called me.”  She looked back at the house.  “Poor fellow.  It’s a lovely house; pity it’s been cursed.”

            Elisabeth swallowed.  “You don’t….”  Her throat closed, and she cleared it.  “You don’t think that…the First Evil is responsible for this?”

            “The First Evil?” Ms Burnwell’s tone was mild.  “No, the First wouldn’t have respected your Eucharistic circle.  In fact, it’s rare that such things do; incorporeal evils have little truck with the bread and the wine, as I’m sure you know.  No; I’m fairly certain this is a garden-variety haunting of human supernatural origin.  No less tricky than the other kinds, though.”  The witch’s gaze returned to Elisabeth’s face.  “I did think it odd when I heard that Rupert Giles had taken a practicing Christian for a partner.  But now I’ve met you it seems less so.”

            Elisabeth said nervously, “The subject was under discussion?”

            “Well, yes.  We made him a conduit for some fairly strong magicks, you know.  And ecumenical harmony has hardly been the norm for such relationships in the past.”

            Elisabeth nipped a small smile in the bud.  She rather liked this woman’s style of understatement.  She shifted her picnic basket to the other hand and started round the flagstone path toward the front drive.

            In the gravelled parking area at the side of the house she was surprised to see that the woman had actually arrived by car—a very ordinary-looking suburban vehicle, no older than the car Rupert had purchased on his return to England, which waited companionably next to it.  “So,” Elisabeth said casually, “do you have a day job, then?”

            “I’m an accountant,” Susan Burnwell said, without cracking a smile.

            Elisabeth broke into a laugh—a laugh slightly edged with hysteria, but a good release nonetheless.  She finished with a sigh and stared up at the house.  “Poor Rupert,” she said.  “He didn’t ask for a haunting.  I guess it’s gonna be research-ho for us now.”  She sighed again.

            They were still standing there, Elisabeth breathing herself back into equilibrium (and nerving herself up to ask whether Ms Burnwell had been in Oxford at the time of Willow’s call, or if she had magicked herself and the car over from the Chilterns), when the sound of a distressed motor from the road made them turn.

            A car Elisabeth recognized immediately as Brian’s raced up the curve, fishtailed into the lane, and shot a cloud of gravel dust behind it as it barrelled toward them.  It lurched to a stop, and Rupert leapt out of it, gaze fixed on her.  “Are you all right?” he demanded, and without waiting for a reply ran to her and grabbed her up in a crushing hug, knocking the picnic basket to the ground with a violent rattle.

            “I’m fine—I’m okay—” Elisabeth found her face muffled in his sport coat, obscuring her attempts to reassure him.  She squirmed.  “Rupert—really, I’m okay.  You can…um, Rupert, you’re starting to smush.”

            He let go of her, leaving her sense of gravity slightly disturbed, but immediately took her by the shoulders and looked her in the face.  Through her glasses (knocked askew by his abrupt embrace), she could see his eyes, hardly less frightened at the sight of her alive and perpendicular, searching hers avidly, pupils wide.  Her hands came up instinctively to touch his where they gripped her.  “Really.  It’s okay.”

            At last his gaze moved over her shoulder to Susan Burnwell.  “Thank you,” he said.

            The witch moved a hand.  “There was very little for me to do.  Do you need me for anything else?”

            Elisabeth turned to look at her, then at Rupert.  They glanced at one another, then shook their heads.

            “I’ll be going then,” she said, striding in her smooth fashion toward her car.  “Do call us if you want to have an exorcism party.”

            “Have fun storming the castle,” Elisabeth murmured, as Susan Burnwell ducked into her car and started the engine.

            “Eh?” Rupert appeared not to have heard her.  “Shall I take you home?  I’ll feed you tea.  Or something stronger.  You’re sure you’re all right?”

            “I’m fine,” Elisabeth said.  “I’ll follow you to Brian’s so you can take his car back.”

            “Oh,” he said, plowing his hand through his hair and making his sport coat sail out briefly.  “Right—I’d forgotten.  Right.  We’ll do that.  If you’re sure you’re all right.”  He turned his distracted gaze to Brian’s car, which stood, door open, still running patiently.

            “I’m sure I’m all right,” Elisabeth said.  “Really.”

 

*

 

Brian insisted on seeing Elisabeth to make sure she was indeed fine.  “It’s not a problem,” she said for the fourth time, exasperated.  “I’ve been in much worse danger dozens of times, including when I was vagabonding in the States.  Stop fussing.”

            “Well,” Brian said in an undertone, with a glance at Rupert drinking a glass of water in the kitchenette, “he was in a right state, you know.  I thought we were having an apocalypse in our back garden.”

            Elisabeth shuddered lightly.  “Don’t say the A-word, if you please.”

            Brian continued in soft sarcasm:  “But if _all_ it is is a haunting, then blimey, what was my car martyred for?”

            “Brian, please.  Your car’s fine.”

            “No thanks to him.  But never mind,” he added, when he saw Elisabeth’s eyes going pink and wet.  “You’re all right and there’s been no destruction of property and there’s no apocalypse and I got to cut my hours short to come home.”  He chafed her shoulder.  “It’ll be right.  Go home.  Drink something warm.  Talk it over with him.  I’ll see you tomorrow.”

            Elisabeth got hold of herself with a long sniff.  “You don’t mind having a look around?”

            “Honestly?  I’m glad you’ve finally got something for me that I know how to do.”

            “Okay,” she said.  “Research party tomorrow, then.”

            “Absolutely.  I’ll bring the maps.”

            “Thank you.”

            Brian grinned.  “You owe me ice cream.  And possibly a tune-up.”

            Elisabeth gave him a wavering smile.

 

*

 

Back at home, Elisabeth tried to unpack the picnic basket, to wash the dishes and dispose of the food, but Rupert wouldn’t let her.  Instead, he made her a cup of chamomile tea and sent her back to the bedroom to rest while he did it himself.  Disturbingly, she only gave him a long unreadable look before acquiescing without a fight.

            He took his time clearing up the picnic mess before picking up his jacket from the chair where he’d parked it and determinedly going to join her.

            She wasn’t lying down; she was leaning against the wall at the window frame, looking out on the bright day outside, the tea half-forgotten in her hands.  She had removed her glasses, but not, apparently, to cry: her face in profile was calm, though a little somber.

            Tentative, Rupert put the jacket down on the foot of the bed and reached to tug his tie loose.  He cleared his throat, and she turned.

            “We gonna have that talk now?”  Her voice was soft wry corduroy.

            He gave an aching sigh and tossed his tie down on the bed with the jacket.  “I think I’m beyond apologizing,” he said.  “I should have told you before.  I don’t know what was stopping me.”  He would have gone on, but he found himself out of words.  Slowly he moved around the foot of the bed and sat down on its edge, on the side that was his.

            She made no answer to him at first. Then:  “Yeah,” she said.

            They were silent again, Rupert’s eyes on his dusty wingtips.

            For a long time neither of them said anything, and the air was thick with the irony of their “talk,” devoid of content.  Then she said:  “Things like this make me feel so useless.”

            This brought his head up.  “You?” he said.  “Why would—”

            “I’m not handy with a crossbow,” Elisabeth said, her eyes out the window on the outdoor street life.  Her hands shifted around her tea mug.  “I don’t know any spells.  I have three reading languages if you’re generous.  And I’m afraid of the dark.”

            “That doesn’t make you useless,” he said quietly.

            She turned, and her gaze hit him direct in the eyes.  “Then why did you leave me out?”

            For a moment, his breath ended.  “I—didn’t—”

            “You knew about the house.  How long?”

            He sighed helplessly, meeting her gaze.  “I suspected for some days.  Last night confirmed my suspicions.  But I didn’t _leave you out_—nobody knew except—”

            “It’s got nothing to do with other people,” Elisabeth said.  “You didn’t take me into your confidence.  Why wouldn’t you, unless you didn’t think I was capable of handling it?”

            An edge crept into Rupert’s voice despite himself.  “It wasn’t you that was incapable of handling it,” he said.

            Whatever was in his face made the angry lines in her expression dissolve into compassion, and she turned her face back to the window without answering him.

            There was a silence, then she said:  “You must have been so disappointed.”

            His response came raw, before he could examine it for traces of the self-serving.  “I wanted to make a safe place for you….”

            She rounded on him sharply.  She did more:  she put down her tea on the windowsill and gave him a hard, uncompromising stare.  “A safe place?” she repeated.  “Rupert: _a safe place?_  There’s no such thing.”

            He recoiled; of all the ways she might have responded, he hadn’t expected this, and he wondered if he ought to have.  “Well, it’s relative, of course,” he began.

            “No,” she said, angrily, “it’s not.  There’s no such thing as a safe place.  You know better than to tell me a lie like that.  No home, no fortress, no island, no grave, even.  Do you think,” she said, and her voice shook, “do you think I stopped running because I found a place that was _safe?_  No:  I stopped because I finally figured out there’s no place to run to—”

            She broke off and turned her face away again, breathing hard.  She spoke again after a moment, more quietly.  “I don’t expect safe places.  I don’t expect you to make me one.  If there’s not a haunting in the place you go to, there’s always the one you bring with you….”

            He sat, voiceless, watching her throat slide in a dry swallow.  Here were all the things Anne had mercilessly (or mercifully, take your pick) drawn out of him, and she knew them, and understood them, herself.  He lowered his eyes to his lap.  “I know,” he said hoarsely.

            When she spoke again, her voice was firm once more.  “I’m not going to be able to bring much firepower to this exorcism thing,” she said; “but I don’t want you to coddle me either.”

            Something in Rupert’s chest relaxed a bit; but he kept his eyes down, and his throat still ached.

            “Rupert: do you read me?”

            He lifted his head so that he could meet her eyes.  “Yes,” he said.  “I read you.”

            “Okay,” she said, and he could tell she meant it.

            She came to him then and reached to touch his hair.  “I’m sorry about your house,” she said, bending to kiss the top of his head.  “Don’t worry.  We’ll fix it.”

            She would have pulled away again, except he bent forward to rest his brow against her front for a moment, and his hand found hers, fumbling for a grasp.  Willingly she touched his hair again, and stroked him for a moment before withdrawing to look down into his face.

            “Did I hear you say something about Indian takeaway?” she said, with a small, dry smile.

 

*

 

Contrary to both their expectations, it was Rupert, not Elisabeth, who suffered nightmares that night.  Thrashing, he jolted against her, and she fought in vain to stay asleep before realizing, dimly, that he was in distress.  Before she could move to gather him against her, however, he bolted upright, and blearily she saw his outline begin to rock manically in the semidarkness, his breath half-voiced in his throat.

            Urgently, she sat up.  “Rupert,” she said quietly, reaching for him.  “Are you awake?  You’ve been dreaming.  Are you awake yet?”  She felt his muscles trembling under her fingers.

            “N-no,” he uttered; she could not tell if he was answering her, or still locked in his dream.

            “Rupert,” she said, more firmly, “you’ve been dreaming.  It’s okay now.”

            “Jenny?” he said, and Elisabeth actually sat back and took her hands away from him for a moment.  She shook off the shock and touched him again, chafing his spine as he rocked.  “No,” she said, “it’s me.  You’re waking up now.  You’re all right.”

            He was waking.  He stopped rocking under her touch and sat, breathing hoarsely in the darkness.  She waited until his breathing slowed before she said:  “You were dreaming.  Do you want to talk about it?”

            She felt him move, and knew he was shaking his head.  “No,” he said thickly.  “Too confused.”

            Elisabeth knew all too well what that was like.  She wondered if it was unworthy of her to feel relieved that he would not unburden himself.  Masking the thought, she reached for the water she kept on her bedside table.  “Here.  Drink some of this.”

            He obeyed, shakily; then gave the water back to her when he was finished, and lay back down as she was putting it back on the table.

            “Y’okay?” she asked him softly.

            “Mm,” he said.

            She shifted back against the headboard and settled herself so that she could relax and still stroke his hair.  He seemed to be accepting her touch, so she continued.

            “Sorry,” he murmured.

            “Don’t be,” she said.

            He arched, breathing in deeply, and turned to lie on his side, facing away from her.  She let him go, but when he had settled, let her hand light on his shoulder, stroking with her thumb.  She felt no resistance in him to her touch, and did not know whether she felt thankful or grieved.

            “No safe places,” Rupert muttered.

            She moved her hand in answer, to smooth the T-shirt over his arm, and continued the motion until he was asleep again.  When his breathing was deep and even, she took her hand away and slid down under the covers, turning away from him and putting her back to parallel the warm firmness of his.  She closed her eyes. 

But it was a long while before she could swallow the ache under her tongue enough to fall asleep.


	4. Unhealthy Souls

_Time past and time future_

_Allow but a little consciousness._

—T.S. Eliot,_ Four Quartets_

 

_“Fool, fool, back to the beginning is the rule,” Elisabeth murmured, as the train picked up speed out of __Oxford__ station.  She had chosen the words to match the _accelerando_ of the train’s rhythm, but she wasn’t so sure that they didn’t have a more pertinent meaning.  She felt that something—not quite fate, not quite time—was circling like a pen point round and round in smaller spirals, to make a mark she had seen before it existed.  She had written a letter to Rupert on blue paper, much as writers in the 20th century had done, with fountain pens inscribing everyday business that now lay neatly folded and itemized in university repositories, where she had tended them and then flown like a lost bird to settle across the sea._

_            “But even there your right hand holds me fast,” she said to herself.  She had written to Rupert to say she was coming to see him.  And Willow.  At his house._

_            It was a mistake, she knew, even before she had made it irrevocable.  And it was irrevocable—how could it be anything but too late to stop this ill-advised love affair?  She had, she thought, been resolute.  Flint-faced, even.  _Go away,_ she had told him.  _I lied to the Council, and it was my last lie.  I can’t say I don’t—have feelings for you._  She had shied away at the last minute from saying:  _I’m in love with you._  So overwrought, and what if she hadn’t second-guessed enough?  There was always more second-guessing you could do._

Go away,_ she had said.  _I can’t lie any more.  I’m a liability to you.  Go away.__

_            He went away._

_            But then he came back._

_            Bruised, drained, his bones and his control in fissures, he showed up on her doorstep, some days after Elisabeth had felt the dark tremor in the world.  And she had thought at first he had come to her, as he had before, for help._

_            But then, after fifteen seconds’ worth of his coming inside amid Elisabeth’s mindless small-talk, he had grasped for her, gathered her in his arms and kissed her: a new sort of kiss, not merely desperate, not merely passionate, but a perfect and weightless plunge:  a kiss in which he was never, never again holding back.  And suddenly, neither was she._

_            Had that been the moment at which it was too late?  Or had that moment come before, below the surface of her notice?_

_            Only one thing was certain: the moment was behind her._

_            The train picked up speed, and Elisabeth resettled herself in the seat to watch the green landscape slip by._

_            “Back to the beginning,” she whispered, and controlled a shudder._

 

*

 

“One thing is,” Elisabeth said as she lifted a heavy tome from the rickety shelving unit she had improvised, “once we get the house in proper shape, we’ll have a place for all these, with _real_ shelves.”

            “_If_ we get the house in proper shape,” Rupert said gloomily.  “And if you like, I can bring up some of my shelving units from Bath in the interim.”  He took the book from her and laid it down to open.  “You certainly did cast a wide net, didn’t you?  I haven’t seen the _Marcianus Compendium_ in a donkey’s age.  Useful little bastard.”

            “Not so little,” Elisabeth said, realigning the remaining books on the groaning shelf.  “And not so _if_.  We’ll get the house de-haunted, or I’ll know the reason why.”

            He watched her for a moment as she wrangled the heavy books, which began to fall as soon as she let go of them, before getting up to help.  “Don’t underestimate the simple things,” he said.  “Simple things are usually what defeat us.”  His hands held the end of the stack while she shifted the other end.  “I’ll be sure and get some of my heavy bookends, too.”

            “That would be a help.”  Elisabeth sat down and picked up her legal pad, flapping with many pages turned to the back.  “So, the _Marcianus Compendium_.  What else do we need, Cyrano?”

            “Cyrano?” Rupert sniffed.  “I’m not the one planning death-or-glory charges.”

            “But you _are_ the one expecting to die from an urchin’s ambush in the street.”

            “I don’t expect anything,” Rupert said.  “Except perhaps to be surprised.”  He let his fingers rove over the spines of the books Elisabeth had collected, but abruptly stopped at one and yanked it out, threatening the rickety shelving unit with utter rocking collapse.  “A _Short Listing of Tripedal Ritualists?_  I’ve been looking for one of these for thirty years!  Where did you get it?” he demanded.

            She looked up from her notes with a far-too-innocent blank facial shrug.  “From a bookstore?  I’d have to look in the invoice file.”

            He stared her down, with mixed results: she dropped her eyes, but it was with a smile that she picked up her pen.  “You haven’t read it?” he inquired, suspiciously.

            “I haven’t had time,” she said.  “But I did wonder what that one was about.  From the title, it appears to be a ‘short’ listing of tripedal ritualists.  What’s a tripedal ritualist, anyway?  Is it a performer of rituals who has a big—”

            “No,” Rupert said witheringly, and Elisabeth grinned.

            “So,” she said, poising her pen, “what else, cap’n?”

            “I think I liked ‘Cyrano’ better,” he murmured.  Then, at her raised-eyebrow look:  “I need _Thaumogenesis and Its Variants_.  Did you get that one?”

            She frowned.  “I…think so.  The title’s familiar, but maybe it’s because it’s one I didn’t manage to get.  The books are alphabetical by title….”  She leaned over to look at the bottom shelf where the Ts were.  “Nnnnoooo….oh, wait, yes, here it is.”  She tugged the volume out of its spot, and the whole shelf rocked forward toward destruction.  With a sharp cry Rupert threw himself against the unit, flinging his arms out just in time to stop books toppling to the floor.  The shelving trembled dangerously, but did not collapse, and Rupert relaxed, panting, against the books.

            Elisabeth looked up at him, primming her lips in a thoughtful hum.  “Don’t guess that was the smartest thing I ever did,” she said lightly.

            “No,” he said, “it wasn’t.”  His tone must have been sharper than he planned, because she glanced down again, looking stung.

            “_You_ did it too,” she muttered under her breath, and Rupert sighed.

            For a few silent minutes they went about their business, Rupert browsing her shelves and Elisabeth making notes on her pad.  Presently he looked down at her, hoping to draw her glance and put an end to the discomfort in the air; but she kept her head bent and her attention on her notes.  He noticed that the tag of her shirt was sticking up over her collar, and reached to tuck it in.  She jumped and stifled a small cry.

            “Sorry,” he said instantly, “it was just—your tag was sticking out—”

            She reached for the back of her neck and smoothed her collar convulsively.  “No, sorry, I thought—it was a bug or something.”  She bent her head to her work again.

            Rupert thought this was not quite sufficient explanation for the abstracted motion of her hand still rubbing protectively at her neck, or her change in color.  He had tried to ignore it, but he couldn’t help noticing that occasionally she became distressingly jumpy about being touched, and at the oddest times.  Troubled, he sighed again and returned his attention to the books.

            Without further ado they chose books and marked them off; then Elisabeth got together their ratty collection of satchels and began packing them with their selection.  “We have enough shoulders for these, you think?” Rupert remarked mildly as she flapped one shut over its bulging contents.

            “Guess we’ll find out,” Elisabeth said.  She heaved the satchel onto the couch with a grunt.

            He glanced out the window at the unremarkable grey weather.  “Good thing it’s not so bloody hot,” he murmured.

            She spared a glance in the direction he was looking before flapping shut another satchel without comment.

            “I should have gone out there today.”  He couldn’t seem to stop himself muttering inanely.  “Make sure nothing caught fire.  We never did turn those lights off....”

            Elisabeth straightened abruptly and put her fists on her hips.  “Rupert,” she said, “for heaven’s sake stop fretting.  We are working it, okay?  It’s just a damn ghost.  _You’re_ making me more nervous than _it_ did.”

            There was a silence while he glared back at her, at first in resentment, and subsequently in intent consideration.  “You’re really not worried about it.”

            She bent again to her packing with a noisy sigh.  “Only thing that’d really bother me is if the First were involved, and your Wiccan accountant says the First wouldn’t have bothered to respect my Eucharistic circle.”

            They never mentioned the First if they could help it.  Rupert flinched, and knew she saw it, though she was not looking at him.  It occurred to him that Elisabeth might have her own reasons for being blunt: he had learned it was a favored tactic of hers when she was feeling off-balance, or when her strength had gone brittle.

            “I _do_ care about your well-being, you know,” he said.

            This stopped her.  She put down the book she had lifted and looked up at him.  She opened her mouth, but it took a second for her reply to come.  “I know,” she said, finally.

            He forced himself to say the rest of it, lame as it sounded.  “More...than I care about the house.”

            A hint of wry, wistful humor touched the corners of her lips.  “I know,” she said, softer.  “It’s nice to hear, though.”

            Rupert found himself relaxing a very little.

            “Grab a couple satchels,” Elisabeth said.  “Let’s go work the problem.”

 

*

 

Meanwhile, at his flat, Brian Whitaker was also packing.  There was a crate of books from his own collection waiting jammed on his dining table amid stacks of papers, an uneven pile of printouts and photocopies he’d brought back from London, and a neatly-folded stack of borrowed maps he had to fit somehow into his satchel with fifty million other books and papers.  “You had to have two living spaces, Brian,” he muttered, and went into a mimic of himself four years ago.  “Oh, but I’ll be so independent with rooms outside College.  Ha.  Not bloody likely!  If independence is carting books from one home to another, I’m up to my arse in it.”

            As he prepared to hoist the satchel to his shoulder and gather up the other materials, he glanced about his flat, as if looking for some answer he had missed.

            He hadn’t signed on for this, exactly.  He wasn’t the tales-of-true-horror type, and it would have been so nice simply to sink back into an uneasy skepticism.  But it would have meant losing a friend, and ultimately risking his own life.  And he had to admit that the discovery of a whole parallel history, woven in with the world he inhabited term in and term out, was the tiniest bit intriguing.  The boyish part of him who wanted to build Lego models of French medieval castles also wanted to draw diagrams of the esoterica Elisabeth and Rupert had brought him into contact with: to see how it worked, to watch how the dominoes had fallen.  The ramshackle bookshelves he used to divide his flat into three rooms were stuffed with the books that had failed him in this particular quest, and he felt a little lost.

            “They say truth is the daughter of time,” he murmured, hoisting up the heavy crate.  “Well, hello, Father Time, may I take your daughter out tonight?”

            Grunting, he staggered his way out the door and hooked it shut with his foot after him.

 

*

 

Later, over an ancient and heavy table discarded by one of the common rooms and now spread with piles of maps and photocopies and books, he steepled his fingers together with only a minimum of self-consciousness and said mockingly, “Let’s play ‘What Do We Know?’.”

            “Only if _I_ get to be George Frankly,” Elisabeth said, hitting keys on the laptop she had perched among the much older research accoutrements with a jovial air.

            Brian and Rupert merely stared at her.  Elisabeth ducked her head and muttered something about “damn Brits” and “Children’s Television Workshop.”  She recovered enough after a moment to say, “First, we know the house is haunted.”

            “Do we know what kind of haunting it is?” Brian asked warily.

            “Well, certainly malicious,” Rupert said, flipping through some of the printouts Brian had made while in London.  “And probably dangerous.  I did place a circumspect call to the previous owner’s son, who didn’t particularly like my delicate line of questioning but did volunteer that his father refused to do anything to the place, and was reluctant to have people over.  I found that rather suggestive.”

            “The house doesn’t like being meddled with,” Elisabeth said, her eyes on her computer screen.  Rupert and Brian exchanged glances.

            “So—” Brian drew a deep breath— “we know that whatever’s…er, possessing the house…would it be fair to say that it doesn’t want anything to be changed?”

            “A fairly common aim of malicious haunts,” Rupert said.  “Perhaps a change occurred to the house in its history that might give us a clue.  Did you—?”

            “Oh yes,” Brian said grimly.  “It’s all there.  And if we’re looking for a suspicious death, we’re going to have to narrow it down.”  He unearthed an example and dropped it in front of Rupert, who smoothed out the paper to read:  a photocopy from a 1911 _Oxford Chronicle_ with a bold headline:  “Retired Tutor Found Dead in Hanging Suicide.”  He squinted at the small, blurred copy of the newsprint.  “It says the news came as a shock to everyone, who knew Mr Mellingwhite as a cheerful old man who had plans to fully renovate his new home, shown in photo, known as Pyke’s Lea.  He had already converted the scullery-cum-mudroom at the back to a conservatory (ah! that explains the odd placement of the windows), and was planning to restore the indecipherable frescoes on the ceiling of the study.  It says that he had never appeared despondent, though the last few times he’d been seen in public he had a ‘hunted’ expression.  H’m.”

            “And he’s not the only one.”  Brian began lifting stacks of photocopies again.  “A whole family got it when they tore down the original stable to build a modern garage in 1938.  The creosote was hardly dry when the father hanged himself, kicked over a paraffin lamp, and set the building on fire, trapping the wife and two sons, who were in there too for some reason.  Gruesome.  ‘Course, the next people who took over the house, according to a retrospective article the next year, had been anxious to rebuild the garage but held off indefinitely when the Blitz came along.”  He looked quite cheerful, rooting through the inches of paper on the table.  “And then there was this bloke in 1876….”  He broke off to unearth a large map, which was covering up another stack of photocopies.

            “…1876?” Rupert prompted, looking up at Brian, who was now frowning thoughtfully at the map through his reading glasses, which were perched on his long nose.  “What did _he_ die of?”

            “Oh, he didn’t die,” Brian said, looking up.  “He just went mad.  They had him committed, like Conan Doyle’s old man, because he started blibbering about fairies and whatnot.  He was an entomologist,” he added, pensively.

            “Did he do anything to the house?”

            “Cleared out the attic,” Brian said, grinning.  “At least, that’s what the housekeeper said his last big project was, in the article.”

            Elisabeth, tapping away at her keyboard, snorted. “I’m cleaning up the table of owners here,” she said.  “Looks like the house’s provenance goes back to…1659, according to this.”

            “That’d be about right,” Rupert said; “it matches the date on the cornerstone.”

            “Civil War era,” Brian muttered, whistling between his teeth.  “I think I’ve got a map of the area that age.  Hang on.”

            They all had to help him shift papers and books to get at the map, which was large and unwieldy and sprawled over the whole table (Elisabeth shut the lid of her laptop).  Brian murmured, “Legend…legend…ah.  1650.  Damn.  Decade too early.”

            “But there is something there,” Rupert said, pointing at the wood and meadow where his house now stood.

            “And it’s called ‘Pyke’s Lea,’” Elisabeth said, leaning close to get a look.

            Rupert squinted at the markings.  “Looks like the name once referred to the meadow.  Must have stuck to the house after it was built.  But what is that?”

            He traced a mark on the map that lay at the head of the meadow, close to the lane.  “Old. Bart.”  He frowned.  “That can’t be right.”

            “But that’s what it says,” Elisabeth said, putting her head close to his to read the minuscule writing.  “St. Bartholomew?”  She wrinkled up her nose to raise her glasses to the right reading height.

            “Bartholomae,” Brian said suddenly.  “There was something I saw about a scandal—the name was Bartholomae….”  He dived for a stack of books and began flipping through them feverishly.

            “Then who was Pyke?”

            Rupert shrugged.  “Probably some owner or factor of the land, before it was redivided.  D’you think we should entertain the possibility that the haunting goes deeper than the house itself?”

            “If that’s the case,” Elisabeth said, “why is the ghost so all-fired determined to stop anybody playing Martha Stewart?  You’d think it would have wanted the house destroyed altogether….” She broke off and frowned pensively at the map.

            “Elisabeth…?”

            “Ha! Found it!”  Brian brandished a moldy-looking cloth-bound book of some indeterminate brownish color, with no title on the spine.  “There’s a whole chapter here—this is a book on local family history—on the Bartholomae family.  Hmm…suspected in the Gunpowder Plot—”

            “Catholics?” Rupert asked.

            “Ah…hang on…yeah.  Catholics.  Model citizens, except for that whole pesky recusant business.  Built a house near Oxford in…wait, this can’t be right—1583.”

            Rupert lifted his head and directed an arid, searching look at Brian.  “Built a house…perhaps this—” he indicated the map— “is the ruin, then.”

            Brian continued without lifting his eyes from the book, while Elisabeth and Rupert pawed about for a later map.  “Yes, here,” Elisabeth said finally.  “The house is on the same site, looks like, though the scales are different.  And it’s been named for the meadow.”

            “I thought it looked oddly Tudor,” Rupert murmured.  “I wonder….”

            “You think they rebuilt—” Elisabeth broke off as Brian continued.

            “So, blah blah misfit religionists—blah blah Charles I—nothing very exciting until 1649—then things get exciting in a hurry.  Mr Bartholomae is suspected of harboring Royalist spies—house raided—big to-do—accusations all round—personal vendettas—some suspicious books—”

            “Books?” Elisabeth raised her head.  “Rupert…d’you think they were Watchers?  Were there Catholic Watchers?”

            “I don’t recall the name Bartholomae in the records I’ve seen, but it doesn’t mean they weren’t.  And as to your other question, Watchers were all sorts of religions, but mostly whatever was convenient at the time.”

            “I wouldn’t call being a recusant Catholic very convenient at this time,” Brian said wryly.  “This whole family was put to death—well, not the women and children, they were carted off somewhere, probably murdered by law later, or slow death by arranged marriage—well, it was a pretty slow death for all of them anyway, because they found the priesthole.”

            “The priesthole?”

            “Yep.  There was a priesthole in the house—doesn’t say where—but it was occupied, by a couple of Jesuits.”

            Rupert whistled.

            “The method these particular Roundheads chose to deal with these Jesuits was to seal them up in the priesthole and starve them to death.  Then when the priests were dead, they took them out and strung ‘em all up in the stable, along with the men of the family and their servants.  Eleven people in all, looks like.”

            Elisabeth made a noise of apprehension, and deep disgust.  Rupert hummed thoughtfully.  Brian flipped a page, unruffled, and resettled his reading glasses on his nose.

            “Gives their names:  John Bartholomae, James Bartholomae, Charles Bartholomae (popular name till the Roundheads took over), Jesse Talmadge, Gavin Starlock, Robert Sallee, Charles Bowen—oh, that’s a sad story.  Hardly more than a kid, he was.  Poor chump, he got sent from up north with a desperate message that the Bartholomaes needed to fly at once.  Not Catholic, not related to the family, no evidence he was a spy, but he showed up at the door while they were holding the Bartholomaes hostage and got taken too.”  Brian lifted another page to turn, and did not notice that Elisabeth, and then Rupert, had gone quite still.

            “Oh, and get this,” he continued, amused, “his old man came down from the West Riding to get his son’s body back, when he heard about it.  They almost didn’t give it to him, but he raised all sorts of hell—there was almost a riot on the premises—apparently they didn’t call this bloke ‘Robin the Bold’ for nothing—oh, for a more enlightened time, when names meant something!”  Brian chuckled.  “He gave a big fuck-you speech to the whole lot of them, Roundheads and Catholics—they’ve got it reported in here—listen to this, Mercutio’s got nothing on Robert Bowen—”

            At last Brian looked up, to gather them in with his grin: but Rupert was staring at him wide-eyed, as if with a look he could silence Brian altogether.  And Elisabeth’s expression was a stunned blank, her face paper-white.

            Presently Elisabeth recovered enough to swallow and draw a breath.  “Excuse me,” she said quietly, “I think I’m going to get some water and a breath of air.”  Neatly she pushed back her chair and, almost without noise, disappeared from the room.  The door clicked softly shut behind her.

            “What?” Brian said to Rupert.  “What have I said?”

            Rupert drew a long breath and let it out in a sigh.  “Robert ‘Robin the Bold’ Bowen has been established as the name of one of Elisabeth’s paternal ancestors,” he said simply, pulling off his glasses and dropping them onto the map.

            “But that’s impossible,” Brian said.  “She’s not from this dimension.  That’s what she said.  Isn’t it—?”

            “She’s not,” Rupert said carefully, “from this dimension originally.  But we don’t know how this dimension accommodated her, whether there was—a—a discrepancy in history, or what have you.  But it seems that some, at least, of her ancestors did exist here.”  He sighed.  “Oh, dear.”

            “Damn,” Brian said.  “God, did I put my foot in it.  I’d better go find her—”

            He was rising from his chair as he spoke, but Rupert said, “No,” in the sort of quiet tone that people rarely disobey.  Reluctantly Brian sank back into his seat.  “Let her come back on her own,” Rupert said softly.

            They sat in an awkward silence for the space of a minute; then Rupert ventured, clearing his throat, “Does the account mention what happened to the original house?”

            “They burned it,” Elisabeth said from the doorway.  “With the books.  Especially the books.”

            Her eyes met Brian’s across the table, and he nodded.

            She came to sit down at the table once more.  Rupert said:  “Dare I suppose we have found our trigger event?”

            Brian said, in a subdued voice, “It’s hard to imagine a situation more fraught with suffering.”

            “Considering that a number of men were killed on that occasion, we may be dealing with more than one ghostly personality,” Rupert said.  He put on his glasses, reached for one of his books, and began to leaf through its worn pages.  There was a small silence while he paused to read, one hand suspended in the act of turning a page.

            Elisabeth said:  “Brian, give me that book you were reading from.”

            Brian hesitated.  “Which—?  Oh, that one.  Hang on—”  He had put it down on an unoccupied chair, out of sight, as if making it disappear might erase his gaffe and Elisabeth’s shock.  He now reluctantly brought it out of his impromptu hiding place and passed it across the table to her.  Rupert’s eyes lifted briefly from his book to watch the transaction, but he said nothing, and did not appear to be watching Elisabeth as she found the section on the Bartholomaes and began to read, her face impassive.

            Brian tore his eyes from her intent figure and asked Rupert, “So what d’you reckon?  You think old man Bartholomae decided to inhabit the house after it was rebuilt?”

            Without lifting his eyes from the book, Rupert said, “There seems to be something missing from the picture.  The whole scene seems to me to be excessively violent.  I wonder if the ‘personal vendetta’ you spoke of had more to do with the outcome than Civil War politics and anti-Catholic hysteria.”

            “According to this,” Elisabeth said, “it did.  The enemy of the Bartholomaes was a family called Falworth.  They duked it out in Ireland and when Charles II came back, and then everybody quietly died out a generation later.  The way this tells it, the feud died with them—course, it helped that the Falworths lost all their fortune by the time of the Restoration, and the last Bartholomae rebuilt the house, as much like it was as possible.”

            “But somebody could have been left behind to carry on the old resentments—giving anybody a hard time that meddled with the house, reenacting hangings….”

            Rupert frowned.  “That doesn’t quite fit, though—the trigger, if what you say is true, ought to be something to do with the people rather than the house.  After all, the importance the house has to the story is that it concealed political refugees, not that it was—”

            “Yes, and anybody messing with the house would release its secrets,” Brian said.

            “But what has that to do with the Falworths?” Rupert pressed.  “They had already discovered the house’s secrets.  There wasn’t any need to conceal or protect—the damage had been done.”

            “But if meddling with the house touches a sore spot, surely the ghost—or ghosts—would react, no matter what the intentions of the meddlers—”

            “Of course.  But that would be the case if, for example, the Jesuits in question were the ones haunting the house.”

            “Do Jesuits haunt?” Brian said dryly.  There was a fine nervous edge in his expression.  He did not like the look Rupert was giving him: it wasn’t patronizing, exactly, but it was the sort of look he’d received from dons in his day and now dealt out to his own students without compunction.  Brian straightened his spine.  “I admit I’m not as experienced as you in these matters,” he said, “but—”

            Rupert neither contradicted nor accepted his gambit; he merely ignored it and said:  “All I’m saying is that the evidence is not presumptive—we simply cannot tell which of the victims—or indeed, the victimizers—is haunting the place without—”

            “I think it’s Charles,” Elisabeth said, her eyes in the book.

            “Which—I or II?” Brian said jocularly, though he knew what she meant; and his heart sank.  She merely looked up at him, and he knew he wasn’t hiding very well the pity and dismay that he felt for her.

            “What’s your reasoning?” Rupert said, turning his gaze calmly to her face.

            “The disturbances in the house are reenactments,” she said, looking over at him.  “Brian’s right about that.  And he’s right about the sore spots.  But it makes much more sense if you look at it as if whatever’s guarding the house is an outsider.  No zealot like a convert, and all that.”

            “Are you saying that you think Charles Bowen became a—”

            “I’m not saying he converted to Catholicism, no,” Elisabeth said.  “Bowens don’t do mass conformity unless they can make it look like it was their own idea.”  A faint, dry smile stole over her face.  Rupert gave a little snort, presumably at her pun.

            “Then—what?”  Brian grasped for understanding.  “He fell in love with one of the Bartholomae women?”

            Elisabeth snorted.  “I’d hate to find out that my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather was that lame.  No, what I meant was: he was forced to die there.  If he’d had no real ties to the Bartholomaes or their cause before, his spirit would likely react one of two ways—total repugnance for everyone involved, like his father, or insistence on getting what he’d already had to pay for.”

            “Which is…?”

            “A part in the play,” Rupert said.

            Elisabeth nodded.

            It seemed to Brian that his entire effort to spare Elisabeth the pain of facing an evil from her ancestors had whipped right through his hands like a runaway anchor, and he couldn’t tell which he felt more—resentment at Elisabeth and Rupert for their partnership and superior grasp of the situation, or shame at himself for attempting once again to white-knight her.  With an effort he mastered himself and said, in a guarded voice:  “That does make sense.  Do you think it’s Charles alone?”

            “I couldn’t say for sure,” she said, “but I think probably so.”

            “Its strong reaction to your presence in particular is suggestive,” Rupert said.

            She nodded.  “I was just thinking that.  So—what kind of spell are we talking here?”

            Rupert let out a deep sigh and laid his open book on the table.  “There are five basic exorcisms—expelling, consuming, sublimating, solidifying, and conversion.”

            “Sounds like a chemistry experiment,” Brian snorted.

            “Rather like,” Rupert replied calmly.  “But much more volatile.  If we’re right, and Charles’s resentments are driving the curse, then I’d say our best choices would be conversion—”

            “—and consuming,” Elisabeth said.  “I’d go for the latter, myself, though the former has its charms.”

            “I think you’re right.”  Rupert turned a page, then another.  “I’ve got two spells in mind for that route.  Why don’t I consult with Willow and check our supplies—and then tomorrow evening we can reconvene and go over the procedure?  Then when night falls, we can go to the house and—” he drew a deep breath— “exorcise it.”

            “Do we _have_ to do it at night?”  Elisabeth took the words right out of Brian’s mouth.

            “To be most effective?  I think so, yes.”  Rupert’s voice was bland, but Brian suspected that he was suppressing an urge to protect Elisabeth, only with more subtlety than Brian had done.  Brian let out an exasperated sigh.

            Rupert stretched and looked at his watch, yawning.  “Good heavens,” he said, “it’s hardly late at all.  Why didn’t I think of cultivating friendships with professional historians before?  I could have saved myself loads of research time.”

            Brian gave this the rich snort it deserved, and Elisabeth hid a smirk as she closed down her computer.

            “Tomorrow, then,” he said, watching them sort through the hodgepodge of materials on the desk and remove their own books and papers.

            Elisabeth gave a weary nod.  “Yes.  Best get a good night’s sleep and eat our Wheaties in the morning.”

            Rupert said, repacking his satchel:  “I do wish the so-called ‘Breakfast of Champions’ was something other than cold cereal.”

            “Or blood.”

            Rupert flashed a little smile into his satchel.  “Which reminds me, we need to get some Weetabix.”

            “And hair product,” Elisabeth said, gravely.

            He laughed.

            Brian said:  “You are both freaks, you know that?”

            Elisabeth flashed him one of her rare bright smiles.  “Goodnight.”

 

*

 

On the way home, Elisabeth amused Rupert greatly with a rendition of one of Spike’s mocking speeches about Angel:  “‘…No, no!  Helping those in need’s my job.  And working up a load of sexual tension and prancing away like a magnificent poof is truly thanks enough.’”  Rupert felt, for the first time in a long while, able to laugh.  “I sure hope Spike and Angel are enjoying one another,” Elisabeth said, giving words to Rupert’s own thought.  He smirked: how long had it been since he’d mocked either one of them?  How long had it been since he’d stepped back for any sort of perspective?

            He glanced over at his partner as he made the turn onto their street.  Her chin was jutting thoughtfully, in a reassuring look of pensive stubbornness, but there was a haunted look to the lines of her eyes as she stared out the window that worried him. 

The implications of the night’s revelations, of course, were worrying in and of themselves.

Neither of them much felt like putting away the books they’d hauled to and fro, so they dumped them in satchels and piles on the couch and went straight to bed.  Rupert attempted to stay awake long enough to be sure that Elisabeth was going to sleep without nightmares, but her stillness, and the quiet of the flat, lulled him into a sleep of heavy exhaustion, and with a little sigh he gave in to it and let go of consciousness.

But something, a little noise perhaps, or a movement like a piano key-hammer on the string of his instincts, woke him while it was still dark.  He reached across the bed without opening his eyes, to reassure himself with Elisabeth’s soft body, even to wake her and make her ready with him for whatever had alerted him…but she was gone.

Rupert opened his eyes.  There was a light on in the den, he could tell by the shadows in the corridor.  There was no sound in the flat.

Quietly, he got out of bed and pulled on his robe, then padded softly into the den to investigate.

Elisabeth was sitting, spine straight, at her computer, unblinking, perfectly still.  He approached her carefully; she had made no sign that she had seen him, and he didn’t want to startle her.  But when he’d reached her shoulder, she swallowed and cleared her throat to speak in a dry rasp.

“They’re all dead,” she said.

Rupert looked at the computer screen.  She had ventured online, it seemed, to find her pedigree—or the pedigree that would have been hers, had she been born here.  Instead of a long chain of births and deaths, however, the screen showed a short branch ending in Charles Bowen’s name.

“Well, of course they’re all dead,” Elisabeth amended, an unconvincing weak whimsy in her voice.  “Death rate of human beings, still holding steady at 100 percent.  And it’s not even that they’re dead, really, it’s just that they were never born.  Charles’s son Robert was supposed to sail for America, but he didn’t, because he didn’t exist.  A cousin of Charles’s went a few generations later, that’s how I found this.”  Her voice trembled a little, but her eyes were dry.

Rupert put a hand out to rest on her shoulder gently.

“Funny thing is,” she went on, her voice growing more constricted, “that book was wrong about one thing.  Charles wasn’t an adolescent when he was killed.  He was young, certainly, but not ‘little more than a child.’  He was….” She paused to swallow hard, and Rupert tightened his hand on her shoulder.  “He was the same age I was when I blundered into this dimension.  Almost to the day.”

He wanted to tell her that this probably wasn’t a significant fact, but he couldn’t, because it probably was.  He cleared his throat.  “I’m sorry,” he murmured.

There was a bleak, devastated look haunting her profile now.  “How many people had to die so I could be here?”

He cleared his throat again, but could not speak.  Instead he moved his hand from her shoulder to find her hand, and gently drew her round to face him.  Looking her in the eye, he shut the lid of her laptop down and drew her to her feet.  “Come,” he said; she obeyed limply as he moved them both to the couch, where he dumped pile after satchel after pile of books on the floor so that they could stretch out.  She lay huddled in his arms, her head tucked under his chin, and he stroked her loose hair, feeling her faint trembling, her taut breathing.

“Wasn’t a mystery we wanted to solve, was it?” he murmured after a while.

She shook her head.  “But,” she said, in a last-ditch attempt at whimsy, “at least we know there’s not another version of me out there to worry about.”

“I suppose,” he said; but then, silently, she began to cry.  He gathered her as close as he could and laid his cheek against her hair.

“I wish there weren’t _any_ versions of me, at all,” she choked out.

“Don’t say that,” he said.

“I hate them,” she whispered, weeping.  “I hate them.  Why can’t they leave me alone?  I _left_.  Instead I come here and here they are and they’ve been _killing_ people.  Oh, how I hate them….”

He rocked her sideways, and shut his eyes.  He wanted to tell her that ghosts weren’t souls; he wanted to tell her that the killings would all likely have happened anyway.  But he knew it wouldn’t make a bit of difference.

She wept wordlessly as minutes slipped past; then she uttered against his chest:  “I can never get away from them.  I can never get away, because they’re _me_.  Oh, why didn’t I just die in that spell…?”

He couldn’t stop the violent reaction: unable to breathe, he bundled her up and away from him, and sat up to extricate his legs and pause, hard-faced, sitting on the edge of the couch.  She gathered herself totteringly into a sitting position next to him, startled and disheveled, the tears forgotten on her face.

“Rupert…what….”

He held out for a brief second more before bolting up, breathing fast, to seek the refuge of the kitchen.

He didn’t know if she’d follow him—didn’t know if he wanted her to.  He got his answer when she appeared in the entry, and he shifted away from her, into the corner of the counter, glaring balefully at her.

“What’s wrong?” she asked him, trembling.  She was pale, and her mouth was drawn in that way it got when she was ill.  “Rupert?”

“Don’t,” he said, holding his voice down to a taut murmur, “_ever_ say that in my hearing again.”  He stilled his own shaking with an effort.

“Say what?” she said.  “What did I say?”

He stared at her helplessly for a moment, then said, “Do you really think that?  Do you really think you’re better off dead?”  If he didn’t get hold of himself, emotion was going to overwhelm him.  He tore his gaze away from her and focused on the cabinet, breathing deeply.

“I….”  She stopped.  There was a long, terrible silence, and Rupert felt himself back in the morass of dread and anguish he thought he’d fought his way out of.

“No,” she said finally, in a very soft voice.  “I don’t—think that.”  Another pause, then she said, “I’m sorry, Rupert.”

He could breathe again, could feel his own extremities; and now the anger set in.  He pressed his lips shut tight and drilled a hole in the cabinet with his gaze.

“That wasn’t,” she faltered, and then regained her voice, “exactly what I meant, you know.”

“I know what you meant,” Rupert said, still not looking at her.  “And that’s not good enough.”

“Then what is?” she demanded.

He was silent, and she repeated insistently:  “What can I do?”

He turned to look her straight in the eye.  “Kick its ass.”

Waiting to see what she’d do, Rupert folded his arms and relaxed against the counter.  For a moment, she looked frightened, but then she folded her arms in a mirror action and glared at him pugnaciously.  “How?” she said, flatly.

In her ratty T-shirt and frayed flannel pajama pants, she looked very much as she had when he’d first known her, in Sunnydale.  He almost expected to see a rising bruise on her cheekbone.  These things had a way of coming full circle.

“So you can’t run away from it this time,” he said.  “Don’t you think it’s time to turn and fight?”

Her lips primmed.  “I think,” she said, “that an inordinate amount of emphasis has been placed on this alleged tendency of mine to run away.  As a matter of fact—” her voice began to rise— “I am much more likely to stay in a bad situation beyond all reason than take off willy-nilly like some—some coward, some quitter.”

Her shot went home:  he went numb again, and fought to keep the evidence off his face.  _She’s not going to leave me over the house_…._But that’s what you’re afraid of_…_some overwhelming reason for her to_….

He had not been successful at hiding his fright: she read his face, and she stared and went white.  “And _this_,” she said, uncrossing her arms in sudden fury, “is nothing like _that_.  It’s just a ghost!”

“Then what the hell were you snivelling about back there?” Rupert demanded.

They stared each other down for a moment.  Then she said:  “It’s my family, Rupert.  That’s how it is with me and them.  I can’t—” her voice caught for a moment, but she regained it— “I can’t help feeling terrorized.  But that’s all it is.”

“You’re saying it doesn’t mean anything?” he said, coolly.

“No.  I’m saying it doesn’t mean—”  She gave an explosive sigh and looked away, gesturing uselessly.  “It doesn’t mean I’m all washed up.  It doesn’t mean I’m desperate.”

_Well, maybe I am_, he thought.  But he said nothing.

“I did say I was sorry.”  She returned his baleful stare, her eyes filling again.  “Maybe you missed it back there.”

He dropped his eyes to his bare feet.  “No,” he said quietly, “I didn’t miss it.”

They were silent for a long time.  The refrigerator compressor clicked on and began to hum.

“So what’s this,” she said finally, “about me kicking ghostly ass?  Does this mean you’re putting me at the forefront?”

Without lifting his gaze from his feet, Rupert nodded.  “Yes…yes, I rather think so.”

“Okay,” she said, and the tightness in his chest came loose at the calm in her tone.  “How’s that gonna work?”

“Well,” he said, “I won’t know details till I talk to Willow, but I’ve got a specific spell already in mind.”  He looked up at her, feeling his anxiety subside for the first time since Charles Bowen’s name had been spoken.  “You’ll need to rile the ghost, I think; then we’ll contain him in a circle, and bind him to a flame.  When the flame burns down completely, he’ll be consumed.”

“Let sinners be consumed out of the earth,” Elisabeth murmured, “and the wicked be no more.”

“Something like that,” he said, with a wry look, which Elisabeth returned.

 

*

 

Without discussion, Elisabeth shut down her laptop and went back to bed; Rupert, meanwhile, unearthed the books he was going to need from the various piles on the floor and made himself a pot of coffee.  He had hit his battle-research stride, and knew there was no point going back to bed.  He did, however, pause to go in and check on Elisabeth before hunkering down with his books—her books—his books….Her eyelids were drooping heavily, but she murmured, “See you in the morning.”

            “Right,” he said, tucking the edge of the covers over her shoulder and smoothing her hair.  She shut her eyes and sighed down into sleep.

            As he settled himself into his chair with his coffee mug and notepad, he glanced at the clock.  Really, there wasn’t a better time than the present to call Willow.

            “Hey, Giles!”  She sounded especially cheerful.  Well, it was all right for some.

            “Hey,” he said, putting as much irony into the word as he could.

            She gave him an audible smirk.  “So, how’s the exorcism research coming?”

            “Oh, we found out who’s haunting the place,” Rupert said.

            “Yeah?  Who?”

            “Elisabeth’s great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather, who was killed there at the same age Elisabeth was when she came here.”

            There was a pause.  “Oh.  That’s…not of the good.”

            “Not particularly, no.”  He went on to fill her in.

            “…so, tomorrow night we’re going to perform the exorcism, with Elisabeth leading the charge.  I thought we’d use the Consuming Flame from _Ars Bellandi Spiritus_….”

            “That’s a good one.  Want me to see if I can find it?”

            “Oh, I don’t need to find it; it’s right here.”

            “Ah—so Elisabeth got that one for her collection, did she?”

            “Oh, now don’t you start,” Rupert muttered.

            “Oh, I think there’s a couple years’ worth of mileage left on that one,” Willow said.  “You ought to be thankful you have a bookscout for a partner.  And you’re going to think twice before you decide to sell your books during a midlife crisis again, aren’t you?”

            “I’m not likely to have another midlife crisis,” Rupert said, bitterly, “as _mid-life_ is rapidly passing me by.  Besides, I think that’s all rot anyway.”

            “Knock that off,” Willow said.  “You’re not even fifty yet.  Stop talking like you’ve got one foot in the grave.”

            “We’ve all got one foot in the grave,” Rupert muttered.  “And speaking of feet, did you know she’s found a _Short Listing of Tripedal Ritualists_?”

            “Really?  Wow.  I’d like to have a look at that one sometime.”

            “I’m sure you would,” he replied, with a sardonic smile.

            “You better watch it.  Or one day I’ll show up on your doorstep without warning.  There are advantages to having mastered the fine art of teleportation, you know.”

            “You’d really waste that much energy to come and give me a talking-to?”

            “Damn straight,” Willow said.  “Anyway, I’m gonna be ready in case you need a backup for tomorrow night.”

            “Yes,” Rupert said, “that’s probably wise.”

            They exchanged details of spells and times, and Rupert led the conversation toward a gentle close.  But then Willow said:

            “So how’s Elisabeth holding up?”

            “I think,” he answered guardedly, “she’s all right.  It’s a bit of a shock, of course.”

            “What a way for her to be integrated in this dimension.”

            “Indeed,” Rupert said, letting out a great sigh.

            “And how are you?  I mean, really.”

            “Oh, you know,” Rupert said, quirking his head sideways in a gesture Willow couldn’t see.

            “Do you want me to come out there?  I can come out there.”  Her tone was quite serious, but before Rupert could respond, she added, “I can come out everywhere,” and he had to laugh.

            “But seriously,” Willow said, “you and Elisabeth shouldn’t be alone at a time like this.”

            “We’ll be fine,” Rupert said, in what he hoped was a reassuring voice.

            “Well, darn,” Willow said.  “Because I was really hoping to get a look at that _Short Listing of Tripedal Ritualists_.”

            “I thought you didn’t go in for the tripedal thing anymore,” Rupert said dryly, privately shocked at himself for making a joke like this to Willow.

            “I still like to read about it!  Plus, Xander reads lesbian porn.  Probably,” she added, lowering her voice significantly, “you do too.”

            “I don’t need porn,” Rupert said recklessly.  “I can just—remember my wild youth.”

            Willow dissolved into a wicked snicker.

            “And if I find out I’ve been quoted on that in one of your bloody chat rooms, I won’t be responsible.  I’ve got enough to deal with without—”

            He didn’t bother finishing the sentence, as Willow was laughing too hard to hear him anyway.

 

*

 

Elisabeth woke from disjointed dreams about nothing in particular to the sound of her cell-phone ringing.  Reluctantly she surfaced from the bedclothes to feel for the phone where she had left it on her nightstand.  “Hello?” she muttered, dragging her eyes open to the aging morning light.

            It was Dr. Biggs, asking if she wanted to come in and discuss a problematic aspect of her thesis plan.  It took Elisabeth a second, but she managed to remember that she had in fact written a thesis plan and that there was in fact a problem with it.  “Right,” she said, “I’ll be right there.”

            She got up and spent a few half-conscious minutes in front of the mirror before deciding that she could get away with not showering if she bound her hair in a low ponytail and wore her flat cap.

            After a short time spent struggling into her black skirt and a random brown sweater that happened to be clean, Elisabeth bustled out into the den with her boots in one hand and a large sheaf of papers in the other arm.

            Rupert was at the dining table, hunched painfully over several open books spread around him; but he had several pages of meticulous notes to show for his pains, and his expression had settled into a familiar groove of calm weary professionalism.  Elisabeth breathed a secret sigh of relief and bent to dump out one of the satchels that had been usurped by last night’s research session.

            He looked up as she was stuffing her school books and papers inside it.  “Going out?” he asked.

            “Yeah, Biggs wants a meeting about my thesis plan.  I’m hoping it won’t take too long, but you never know.  I’ll call you if I don’t get back by the afternoon.  How’s the spell plan coming?”  She pulled her boot laces taut with a sharp jerk.

            “It’s finished,” he said.  “When you get back, I’ll go over it with you.  In the meantime…,” he yawned and stretched both arms forward, “I’m going to have a nap.”

            She gave him a strained smile.  “You do that.”

 

*

 

Elisabeth found herself coming more awake as she negotiated the brisk walk across Magdalen Bridge, and the salient points of her review of literature and the thesis plan began to reassume their clarity in her mind.

            But her meeting with Biggs proved slightly frustrating.

            “My dear girl, you can’t simultaneously argue that fairytale represents a significance in chaotic minutiae while at the same time celebrating the fact that those same minutiae are totally free of meaning.”  He spread his long hands in a characteristic querulous gesture.

            “I don’t see why not,” Elisabeth said.  “It’s the way life works, isn’t it?  We narrate a meaning into our lives whether the details actually have meaning or not; but fairytale unzips the facts from their usual significance and rezips it to something else, so you _can_ get freedom and significance in the same act.”

            “Yes,” Dr. Biggs said, “but you didn’t _say_ that.”

            “Well,” Elisabeth sighed, “I didn’t know how to say it last week.”

            “Yes, well,” he replied with a smile, “go home and work on it, and give me a clearer outline of the argument once you’ve worked it out.”

            “Don’t worry,” Elisabeth said, cryptically.  “After tonight, I’ll know everything I need to know about zipped and rezipped significance.”  She packed up her papers and got up to go, but he stopped her at the door with a word.

            “And mind,” he said as she turned, “you take proper care of yourself, you know.  It’ll all be the same in a hundred years—”

            “Or four hundred—”

            “Or a thousand—”

            “And I’ll look both ways before crossing the street and everything.”  Elisabeth smiled.

            “And flossing.  Flossing is important, too.”  Dr. Biggs grinned back and reached for his diary.  “Now get on with you.”

            Elisabeth went, heaving a sigh—whether of frustration or relief she could not tell.

 

*

 

Back at home, she found that Rupert had been true to his word and was fast asleep in bed.  The debris from his research session had been neatened, and the notes for the spell recopied and given pride of place on the top of the stack of books and photocopies.  On the very top of the stack lay his folded glasses.  She paused for a long moment, reaching out a finger to move his glasses a little, and attempting to think.  But the landscape of her thought had changed so completely that she hardly knew how to begin to get her bearings—as if she had never looked behind her, only to be spun blindfold and pointed in the direction she’d come.  The fight for the house was now as much hers as his, and probably, in a way the broader fight against the First had not touched, would determine the nature of her existence in this dimension from this point on.  Rupert was right to worry that she was unprepared to face both backward and forward at once.  Of course, what had _really_ made her angry was the implication that she was liable to leave.  She frowned thoughtfully in the direction of the bedroom.  Was it offensive because he had implicitly insulted her, or himself?  She couldn’t tell.

            And as for the ancient and most noble house of Bowen, Elisabeth had a hand gesture all prepared.  Why she hadn’t thought of seeking out ghosts and exorcising them _before_ (metaphorically or otherwise), she couldn’t imagine.  “I can’t figure out if it’s easier or harder,” she murmured to the cat, who had appeared stretching luxuriantly, “to fight against people you sorta love.  It’s infuriating.”

            And satisfying.  She hoped.

            What she wanted more than anything was to crash into bed with Rupert, but she suspected that wasn’t going to help her sluggish blood any.  So instead she went and stripped down to take a shower.  The steaming water was cleansing, so that by the time she had got out and was brushing her teeth, she was able to look her reflection in the face with relative equanimity.  She put up her wet hair, bundled herself into her ratty blue robe, and went to survey the kitchen cabinets for teatime.

            After some cogitation she unearthed a recipe for quickbread muffins.  She mixed up the batter, feeling quite industrious, and put them to bake.  It was best to keep moving.  She cleaned up the kitchen; moved Rupert’s things from the dining table so they could have tea; washed out the kettle and refilled it.  Then she looked up at the clock.

            With a deep sigh she left the kitchen and went to look in on Rupert.

            He was still asleep, but she could see that he had stirred, and was probably ready to wake.  She sat down gently on the bed and reached across to smooth back his mussed hair.  He gave a little groan, but did not open his eyes.

            “It’s almost teatime,” she told him.  “Don’t die of shock, but I’ve made some muffins.”

            “Mm?”  He smiled, eyes still shut.  “Muffins?”

            “Yeah, with chocolate chips, no less.  They’re baking right now—should be ready in about ten minutes.”

            “Mmm,” he said.  He turned over onto his back and opened his eyes.

            She regarded him silently for a moment, then said:  “Are you still mad at me?”

            He shut his eyes again and shook his head against the pillow.  “You still mad at me?”

            She drew a relieved breath.  “No,” she said.

            A faint smile came over his face.  “That’s all right, then.”

            “Yeah,” she said, smoothing his T-shirt over his chest, “I for one’d hate for us to go to our doom with an unresolved fight on our hands.”

            “Our doom?” he murmured, starting to grin with his eyes shut.  His hand moved gently to capture hers where it lay on his chest.

            “Well, you know,” she said, smiling as he opened his eyes to meet hers, “_il me faut des géants_, and all that.”

            “Now who’s Cyrano?” he smiled.

            “Cyrano nothing,” Elisabeth said.  “Cyrano never had to fight his own relatives.”

            There was a small silence while their gazes met.  His fingers stroked hers; then he moved his touch to the inside of her wrist, within the sleeve of her robe.

            “I see what you’re doing,” Elisabeth said, with a smirk of mock disapproval.

            He smiled up into her face.  “Do you now?  You do realize that there are a number of pre-doom activities that are _de rigueur_ at this point?”

            She snorted to avoid a laugh and turned her head away.

            “You’re blushing.”

            “I am not.”

            “I was referring to teatime, of course,” he teased her.

            She let out a cry of half-laughing outrage and leapt to pummel him.  He struggled back, and they ended with her straddling his waist, her robe coming undone, their arms locked as she held down his shoulders.  He grinned up at her winsomely, his breathing as quick as hers.

            “Don’t want to start something we can’t finish, now,” she panted.

            “Why can’t we finish?”

            “The muffins, remember?”  She bent further over to look him closely in the face, grinning as widely as he.  “Scorched muffin is not what I’d call a romantic scent.”

            His hands swept down to close upon her backside, hard.  “I’m not feeling particularly romantic,” he said softly, and his tone alone was enough to melt her upon him.

 

*

 

It was a good thing that neither of them were in a particularly romantic mood, because the interlude that followed was a brief, awkward tussle, broken at one point when Elisabeth almost fell out of the bed getting her arm out of her sleeve, and at another when Rupert flailed for the nightstand drawer; and punctuated with their breathless snickers as they brought their conflict to a full close.

            Also fortunate was their timing:  when Rupert got up from the bed, purloined her robe from the floor, and padded into the kitchen, he found that the muffins were slightly more brown than either of them preferred, but not at all burned.

            “Dammit, Rupert,” Elisabeth called from the bedroom.  “You took my robe.”  Her voice was coming nearer, and he turned, grinning, to see that she had stolen his robe in turn and had come into the kitchen trailing it like some medieval garment.  The cat leapt at the belt-end as she tied it.

            “Your hair’s all mussed now,” he said.

            “Thanks to you.  Oh, good, they’re not burnt.”

 

*

 

“So how do you dress for an exorcism, anyway?” Elisabeth asked later, as she watched Rupert bustling about half-dressed, muttering as he picked up books and occult objects and put them down again.  She herself was ensconced on the couch in a deceptive attitude of comfort, still wearing Rupert’s robe; she was trying to memorize a Latin spell Rupert had written out for her, but it was difficult with him pacing all around emitting odd snatches of instructions that half-seemed directed at her.

            He paused to finish pulling an old green jumper over his head before answering.  “In layers,” he said finally, as his head emerged, his hair sticking up in all directions.  He worked his arms through the sleeves, and at last looked up to find that she was smiling at him affectionately.  Her smile faded a little as she said:  “I love you, you know.”

            “Probably be a good idea to keep your hair out of the way, too.”  Their eyes met briefly as he bent to stuff two books and a notebook into his battered leather satchel, his expression soft.

            She kicked her feet up and off the couch, abandoning the spell to find some clothes.  “Layers, you say.”

            Elisabeth came back into the room dressing, as he’d been doing; she had put on some jeans and was now fastening her bra at the back, a shirt and a sweater slung over her shoulder.  She plopped back down on the couch, next to the abandoned spell, and began to work her arms into the sleeves of her shirt.  “So what am I saying in this spell?” she asked him.  “My Latin’s not quite good enough to get all this.”

            Rupert had paused with only one sock on, to peruse one of the books he’d been using.  “In the first line,” he said without looking up, “you are telling your father to rest, and assuming his obedience.”

            “My father?”  Perhaps she hadn’t heard right, pushing her head through the neck-hole of her shirt.

            “Yes,” Rupert said, turning a page and glancing up at her briefly.  “For the purposes of exorcism spells, all male ancestors are intelligible as ‘father’.”

            “No kidding,” Elisabeth muttered.

            “In the second line, you are telling him, roughly, ‘Draw together your works and lie down with them.’”

            “Okay, second imperative.  Got it.”  Elisabeth put down the sweater altogether and took up the paper in both hands, mouthing the Latin words silently.

            “Then—” Rupert paused to think, his eyes cast up to the ceiling.  “ ‘You could not make right what was wrong; you could not straighten what was crooked.’”

            “Okay….”

            “Then you tell him that here and now his works will end and yours begin.  And that he will sleep and you will wake.”

            “Lots of imperatives there.  You think he’ll do what I say?”

            “The circle will compel him,” Rupert said.  “And we’ll be there to anchor it.  If all goes as planned.”

            “Ay, there’s the rub.”  Elisabeth pulled her sweater over her head.

 

*

 

They went over to Brian’s flat as the sun began its tired sink below the horizon.  The first thing he said when he opened the door was: “What an excellent day for an exorcism.”

            Rupert snorted.  Elisabeth gave him an abstracted grin.

            “Well, fine,” Brian said, shutting the door behind them.  “Spoil my big moment.  So how does one dress for an exorcism, anyway?  Should I wear a tie?  Joking!” he added, as Elisabeth shot him a horrified look.  She recovered and said, “Layers.”

            “Right,” Brian said.  “Got a clean jumper all ready.”

            After some time during which Rupert laid out the procedure for Brian (and Elisabeth used the bathroom twice, citing nerves), they gathered their ammunition and provisions to leave; after some discussion it was agreed that they should take both Rupert’s and Brian’s cars for convenience and safety.

            As Elisabeth stood shivering in the dusk, watching Rupert pack the boot of his car, she found Brian studying her with narrowed eyes.

            “You’ve been having sex,” he said, quietly.

            She turned to him a quizzical glare.

            “That’s not fair,” Brian said.  “_I_ didn’t get any pre-exorcism sex.”

            Elisabeth shrugged, gave him a sidelong half-grin.  “You snooze, you lose, Brian.  What can I say?”

            Brian stuck his tongue out at her, just as Rupert thumped down the trunk lid and called, “Ready?”

 

*

 

Brian had been nervously anticipating his introduction to Pyke’s Lea.  There had to be something quite special about it, to exert such a powerful attraction on Rupert, and subconsciously he expected the something special to be rather like Elisabeth herself: a sweet charismatic intensity overlaid with a faint surface dowdiness.

            He was not disappointed.  As the two cars pulled up in the drive, he saw that some of the lights were still on, faintly limning the weeds of the front garden.  But the windows were neatly spaced and the dark outlines of walls and gable roof sketched a relaxed sturdiness against the night.  In fact, Brian reflected as he set the hand-brake, it was almost enough to draw him out of his usual bachelor state of mind—the state in which he rarely contemplated changing his own lifestyle for something more permanent, as if his work as a don was just something to keep him going for a few years rather than his life’s ambition.  What would it be like, to work toward owning an actual house, and arranging it just as one liked?

            “Build thee more stately mansions, oh my soul,” he murmured, and popped open the door.

            Of course, it was hard to forget that the house was actually haunted: it seemed to be waiting for them, and the light that ought to have cheered them was malignant.  Rupert handed Brian a satchel full of clinking bottles, glancing at his watch.  “Right,” he said, “we’re on schedule.  Brian, mind the liquids in there don’t spill.  Elisabeth, you have the spell and the candle, right?”

            Elisabeth nodded several times, quickly.  Her back was to them and toward the house, but nevertheless Brian could see her trembling visibly, and heard the soft crackle of her hand clutching paper and candle together.  Rupert urged her toward the front walk; her shoes crunched, shuffling, on the gravel, then she straightened and strode forward.

            She nearly made it to the porch before she faltered and swerved toward the empty flowerbed to double over and heave into the weeds with a small choking sound.  At once Rupert shifted his burdens to one hand and reached out the other to support her by the shoulder.  He said nothing, and made no move to help her or touch her besides that; Brian caught a glimpse of the side of his face, and saw a grim calm there.  Brian felt a little shiver in his own insides: a kaleidoscope of thoughts seemed to click one by one across his mind—_She needs help, she shouldn’t have to do this, not so soon after_—_This is war; I’m in a war again; God I hate this_—_What, are you going to Austin Grey me now?_—_And now in the desolate night—no, don’t quote Stevie Smith for heaven’s sake, she doesn’t like it—hell, I don’t like it_—

            Elisabeth, shaking badly, stopped heaving and drew up the back of her sleeve to wipe her mouth.  With Rupert’s supporting hand on her shoulder, she straightened and drew an audible, ragged breath.  “Ready?” he said quietly.

            She breathed once, and then again, and croaked out, “Yes.”

            “Right then.”  Rupert took his hand away from her and pulled a lighter out of his jacket pocket.  He flicked it open and set fire to the bundled torch he had brought.  When the prepared torch had gathered a strong flame, he nodded to Elisabeth, who mounted the porch (Brian noticed she was no longer shaking) and crossed to the ancient door.

            It opened noiselessly without a fight, swinging away into the dimness of the foyer.

            In the torchlight Elisabeth looked back, eyebrow raised, at Rupert, who gave a confirming nod.  “This,” she said quietly, “is what you call a battle royale.”  And she stepped inside.

            Brian followed Rupert’s broad back through the door after her.  As soon as he was over the threshold and clear, the door swung quietly shut.  Politely.

            The hairs on the nape of Brian’s neck tingled and rose.  “Bloody hell,” he muttered.

            Rupert turned.  “Follow Elisabeth,” he murmured.  “I’ll take the rear position.”

            It didn’t even occur to Brian to be offended at Rupert for suggesting he couldn’t hold the rear guard.  Without a word he continued down the hall behind Elisabeth, who had not stopped even when the door shut behind them.  Though they had not discussed it, she made straight for a door at the back of the hall—a broad, tall door with a carved architrave—and went inside.  Brian followed her.

            Inside, he found a study that would have been as beautiful as it was large, were it not for the neglect and disuse that marked every inch of it from ratty carpet to discolored ceiling.  A small, misshapen, blackened circle had been drawn in something that looked horribly like blood near the center, but Brian had been prepared to see something like it after hearing the story of Elisabeth’s makeshift spell.  Elisabeth went to it and scuffed at the dry, crackling breadcrumbs with her sneaker.

            The light in the room shifted, as if the lit chandelier in the center of the ceiling had swung and spun, but when Brian looked up he found it perfectly still.  Disoriented,  he glanced about to reestablish his notion of the earth’s center, but he couldn’t quite find it.  A shadow, escaped from its substance, flitted across the mirror over the carved mantlepiece.  Brian shut his eyes to stop the dizziness.  “Bloody hell,” he muttered again.

            “All right?” Rupert murmured, and Brian opened his eyes to the other man’s gaze.  His inquiry was clearly not a taunt; _battle royale_, Elisabeth had said.

            “Yes,” he said firmly, and solidified his stance.

            “You’ve got the bottles,” Rupert said.

            “Oh! right,” Brian said, and took the satchel off his shoulder to open it.  A small breeze where none should be ruffled his hair.  He handed round the bottles that had been assigned to each:  fine breadcrumbs for himself, wine for Rupert, and holy water for Elisabeth.  Then he took out the two crosses, passed one to Rupert (who took it with one finger of the hand holding his bottle), and kicked the satchel off to the side.

            The little breeze rose, touching Brian’s face, then fell again.  Elisabeth took two steps back from them both, so that they now stood at equal points of a triangle.  “The candle?” Rupert mentioned; she nodded, searched out a spot on the carpet with her eyes, and moved forward to set down the candle on that spot.  It was a sturdy beeswax candle, but to be safe Elisabeth had fitted a base to it.  It stood now, looking small and lonely on the floor as she stepped back to her place.

            “Ready?”  Rupert was tucking the cross into the waistband of his jeans to free his hands to hold the torch and the bottle.

            Brian nodded.  Elisabeth made no response, but she was clearly ready as well; her chin was high and calm, her eyes inwardly focused.

            They unstoppered their bottles and held them out toward the center, around the candle.  Elisabeth and Rupert turned to step forward clockwise—in his disorientation Brian had almost forgotten which way clockwise was, but he too turned without outwardly swerving.

            Without warning the lights went out, plunging them into near-complete darkness; a sharp blast of wind tore at the flame of Rupert’s torch and very nearly put it out.  “Now!” he cried— “five steps, quickly!”

            It was very difficult to gauge how fast he was pouring his breadcrumbs in the dark, but Brian moved forward the five steps, listening acutely for the sound of them hitting the carpet.  He stopped; in the whipping torchlight he saw a snatch of Elisabeth’s pale face—a bit of her hair had come loose and whipped wraithlike across her cheek.  The wind rose to a shriek.  “Five steps!” Rupert called— “now!”

            They moved another five steps, pouring, and stopped.  “Five more!”  And they moved again.

            But something went horribly wrong.  As he hit the fifth step, Brian felt his feet give way, as if the floor had crumbled beneath him.  He couldn’t stop himself going down, and in the flickering light of the torch he saw Rupert and Elisabeth looking over at him in horror—Elisabeth’s spell was clutched and racketing, crackling, in her hand—

            He went down and rolled over and over, as if thrown by a vicious force.  He lost first the bottle, then the cross—he groped frantically for the latter, as Rupert had specifically told him he wasn’t to lose it—but then a horrible, sickening thing mastered him from the inside and he felt himself straighten in a convulsive jerk—

            He struggled, now blind and more frightened than he had ever been in his life, but he had been taken out of the pilot’s seat of his own body.  His body stood and faced the others, and he opened his mouth to let out a voice that was not his own: it was reedy and male and sweet with venom, and uncannily familiar:

            “_You’re not welcome here_,” it said.

            The slack, horrified look dropped off Elisabeth’s face and was replaced by a steely strong-jawed hardness.  “You don’t say,” she said.

            “_You don’t belong here!_” raged the voice coming from Brian’s throat.

            “Duh!” Elisabeth said, wrapping scorn like spit into one syllable and flinging it at him.

            Brian was wrenched off his feet again.  He flew backward through brief air, then hit the ground with a force that rattled all his bones—then rolled over and over and over until he hit the wall.  And then he was alone within himself, and fully heard the wind shrieking once more.

            Against the buffets of air, he dragged himself step by step to his feet and returned, aching in every fiber, to his place in the circle.  “That,” he said hoarsely, “was not in the brochure.”

            “Is that the best you can do?” Elisabeth screeched to the ceiling.  “That was pathetic!”

            “Speak for yourself!” Brian said, his voice catching sharply.

            “I think she is,” Rupert murmured.  His words were almost lost in the cacophony of winds.

            Scraps of torchlight tore across Elisabeth’s face as she turned on the spot, shouting.  “Bowens are supposed to be good at verbal torture!  What’s the matter with you—you couldn’t have a better target! ‘I don’t belong here’—talk about stating the obvious!  You’ve got another Bowen to cut into and you haven’t got the fucking cojones to—”  She broke off with a cry and turned, and Brian saw that four blunt scratches had torn their way across her cheek.  She gave a screaming little laugh.  “That’s right!  That’s right!  Show me!  I’m here, you’re not.  Show me how you really feel!”

            “Elisabeth!”

            Brian tore his gaze to Rupert at the same moment Elisabeth did, in time to see him toss the torch across the circle to her.  She reached out, as if it had been choreographed, and caught it with seamless accuracy.  She bent the flame toward the floor, and Brian saw that they had succeeded in completing the circle after all.  The torch-flame burned placidly in the ring of crumbs and wine and shining wet: she touched the wick of the candle with it, and the new little flame grew and stood tall and steady and pristine, ready for its work.

            As Elisabeth withdrew the torch from the circle, a new shriek of wind gathered in a broad, suffocating power, and tore the flame away from the head of the torch.  The flame did not return, but as it passed Brian saw seared onto his retinas the image of Elisabeth, hair straggling and whipping across her struck face, her eyes afire with a prophetic passion; and Rupert across from her, gripping his cross, his face carved with the ancient fury of a mage.  Brian became aware that he himself was fighting with every fiber in his body to stand upright, against the chaos of warped gravity and sound.

            In the center the candle burned silent and still.

            Elisabeth began to speak, not minding the tear in her voice, as the wind whipped at her loosening hair.

            “_Patri dixi, Requiesce: et quiescevit_,” she read, gripping the ragged paper with both hands.  Brian doubted she could actually see the words in the faint candlelight, but she continued, pausing only to swallow and resume in her torn voice.

            “_Coge, inquam, omnia opera manuum tuarum/Et iace cum his_….”

            _Et iace cum his, _the wind seemed to whisper back, as if trying to find a way to respeak the words and undo them.

            “_Id quod—erat vitiosum, non potuisti emendare._”  Elisabeth was shaking.  A faint moan came to their ears, buried in the wind.

            “_Id quod erat curvum, non potuisti—corrigere._”  She gulped and went on, the paper trembling as much from her grip as from the wind.

            “_Te continebo: depraesentarium opera tua finientur_—” her voice broke— “_finientur—Atque mea extendentur_.”

            The voice in the wind rose to palpable anguish now.

            “_Depraesentarium requiesces, atque expergiscar_.”

            Brian fought to keep his feet against the weight of horror and grief pressing the room like a flood.

            “_Finientur_—” cried Elisabeth— “_finientur_—_fini_—”

            A whirl of light and power suddenly charged the circle they had made, and was sucked up within it, into the candle flame.  The sudden silence made Brian deaf, and he almost fell over from the sheer ease of standing upright.  Gasping, he bent and grasped his knees, sweating and trembling.

            “Well,” Rupert said lightly—Brian looked up without rising from his exhausted crouch to see that he stood with catlike nonchalance, the cross now lax in his hand— “that seems to have done the trick.  We’d best stick around till the candle is burned out.  Nobody step in the circle, remember.”  He bent to gather the empty bottles and the spent torch.  For a moment Brian wanted to rush him and smack his competent face for him—and then he dissolved in a hysterical fit of laughter.

            He was still laughing when he rose breathless to stand upright.  He wiped his eyes and looked over at Elisabeth.

            She had not moved from her place at the circle.  The loosed tendrils of her hair now fell lank around her face, and though the cuts on her cheek had disappeared, they had now been replaced by streaming tears.  She was staring at the candle flame, burning brightly in the newly-benign darkness.  As he watched, she wiped her face, drew a long breath, and said, her voice now a blasted wisp:  “Well.”

            “All right then?” Brian said, almost as hoarsely.

            “Yeah,” she said.  She looked up at him, and gave a sudden half-smile.  “You?”

            “Other than that whole possession thing—yeah,” he said.

            Rupert was rooting in the satchel Brian had carried.  “I believe,” he said, “there are snacks in here.”

            “_Now_ you’re talking,” Brian said.

 

*

 

They sat, three abreast against the wall in the darkness, and watched the candle burn.  Rupert had packed sandwiches and libations of a non-ritual sort: a beer apiece for himself and Brian, and a cider for Elisabeth.  “Now this,” Brian said, biting into his sandwich with alacrity, “is what I call a wake.”  Elisabeth chuckled.

            Rupert let out a small sigh and leaned his head briefly against the wall behind him.  All things considered, the plan had come off rather well.  It had taken almost no time to call Willow on his mobile and let her know they had bound the ghost, and Brian had recovered from his brief possession not much the worse for wear.  They clinked bottlenecks and toasted the dead, and the last stain dissipated from the shadows.

            One by one they finished their sandwiches and piled the wrappers off to the side.  For a long time there was no sound except when one of them took a swig of his or her drink; and then the crickets joined in, for the first time, soft and jubilant.

            Elisabeth’s hand brushed his in the darkness, and he took it gently.  In the silence he took in the gentleness she was giving him with her touch, and returned her his thanks.

            Still later, he shifted to ease his hipbones on the hard floor, and glanced over.  Elisabeth had fallen asleep between them, her head resting on Brian’s shoulder.  Brian glanced down awkwardly, then looked at Rupert and mouthed, “Is she asleep?”  Rupert nodded, a faint smile on his lips, and Brian relaxed and reached to pet Elisabeth’s arm gently.

            “Guess this is all in the day’s work to you, then,” Brian said at length, softly.  Outside, through the French doors, they could see that the position of the stars had changed from where they were when the task had begun, and the quality of the night had deepened and brightened.

            “You never get used to it,” Rupert said, “if you have a personal stake in the matter.  Which one usually does.”

            Brian answered with a soft grunt.

            “Welcome to the merry band,” Rupert said, his voice both dry and soft.

            “We few, we happy few—” Brian quoted dreamily.

            “—we band of buggered,” Rupert finished, with a secret smile.

            “Precisely,” Brian said.

            There was a small pause, then Brian said:  “You reckon we’ll be back to normal in the morning?”

            “I expect so, yes,” Rupert said evenly.

            “Good.”

            “Right.”

            The candle burned, down and down.

 

*

 

Sometime close to sunrise Elisabeth squirmed awake and lifted her head from Brian’s shoulder.  “Ohh…,” she said.  “I’ve been asleep.  Candle’s almost out.”

            The candle was indeed almost out.  The flame was flickering and guttering, and Rupert and Brian were both watching it glassy-eyed.  Elisabeth sat up straight and began to stretch; following her, the others began to move as well, and as they all three got achingly to their feet, the first gold suffusion of sunrise tinged the eastern horizon outside, and the candle flickered—flickered—flickered—and expired noiselessly.  A faint grey column of smoke twisted upward, curled on itself, and vanished.

            The house was quiet.

            Rupert was the first to speak.  “Shall we go home?”

            “We are home,” Elisabeth said.  “But I do want to get to some place with a fully functional toilet.”

            “Too right,” Brian said fervently.

            “_You_ can pee in the bushes,” Elisabeth said, as they gathered their things and moved toward the front door.

            “In _my_ bushes?  I think not,” Rupert said, offering them the faintest of sardonic smiles over his shoulder as he pulled open the door and lumbered out onto the porch.

            Elisabeth followed him and paused on the topmost step, surveying her dominions.  “Well!” she said.  “Thank God this was a success.”

            “Yes—” Brian put in, “—except for that possession part.”

            “We didn’t even have to summon Willow.”

            “I expect she’s disappointed,” Rupert said, on his way to the car.  “She really wanted to have a look at that _Short Listing of Tripedal Ritualists_.”

            Elisabeth laughed.  “I thought she didn’t go in for that anymore.”

            Brian pulled the door to and followed Elisabeth out into the early dawn light.  “Tripedal ritualists?” he inquired.  “Is that a book about ritualists with big—”

            “_No_,” Rupert said.  But behind his back, Elisabeth nodded at Brian, wrinkling her nose mischievously.  Brian snickered.

 

*

 

The ride home was as silent as the wake had been, except that now Rupert kept yawning.  Once he cracked a yawn so huge that he twitched the steering wheel too hard; the car swerved briefly, and Elisabeth gave a small laugh.

            “Need some coffee,” Rupert muttered.

            They pulled into a parking space down a way from the flat, and Rupert set the hand-brake with a whole-body motion of weariness.  Elisabeth cast her gaze up the street: the sun had risen fully now, and the air was a riot of gold.

            Standing on the stoop of her flat building were two figures; she squinted at them as she opened the car door and got out (she had left her glasses at home for fear of breakage during the spell).

            “Looks like someone’s come to call,” Rupert said.

            Elisabeth stared thoughtfully at them.  One was skinny, and clutched a trenchcoat close round his body with awkward arms.  The other man, stocky and broad-shouldered, was a pirate: as he turned in her direction, she caught sight of the dark eyepatch slung across his face.

            Recognition dazzled her like the morning light.

            “Xander,” she breathed.


	5. The Wounded Surgeon

_Had they deceived us_

_Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,_

_Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceipt?_

_The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,_

_The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets_

_Useless in the darkness into which they peered_

_Or from which they turned their eyes._

—T.S. Eliot, _Four Quartets_

 

_Elisabeth stepped off the train at the tiny station and glanced up and down the platform.  She never quite got tired of the character of small English train stations—no two she had seen were exactly alike—and this particular station was not disappointing:  a short rank of weathered benches waited tucked out of foot traffic against the side of a building that had once been painted butter yellow.  The door to the ticket office had a curved brick architrave, and the station sign—Little Sharpley—swung in its place on the overhang by two links of rusty chain.  The place was deserted; it would be—there weren’t many commuters at this time.  The sun lanced down hot from overhead._

_            Elisabeth hitched her backpack up on her shoulder and went inside to accost the station agent.  He looked up from his paperback, took in her unprepossessing figure, and raised one eyebrow, conserving all possible words._

_            “Vandiver House?” Elisabeth inquired._

_            The agent grunted.  “Isn’t taking people in, not for tours or nothin’.”_

_            “I should think not,” Elisabeth said irritably.  “Which road do I take from here?”_

_            The agent had let his gaze drift back to his place in the book, but looked back up at her question.  “You’re not thinking of walking it, are you?” he said.  Elisabeth gave him back his own raised eyebrow by way of answer.  “Well,” he continued, “it’s a bit of a step from here, you know—down the road to the lane that starts by the white house with the chicken on the post-box, then to the right down that lane and all the way back.”_

_            “Thank you,” Elisabeth said._

_            “Do better to get a cab.”_

_            “Thank you,” Elisabeth repeated politely, and set off._

_            Her shoes were sturdy and she had become inured to walking in _ _Oxford_ _, but the sun was hot, and altogether Elisabeth was glad when she had finally reached the lane the agent had spoken of, which was roofed with tall trees.  She wiped the sweat from her temples, smoothed back the escaping tendrils of her hair toward the knot she’d put it in on the train, and plugged onward._

_            The lane wound on and on.  The pale dust settled on her dark khaki trousers and coated her shoes.  She began to wonder what stubborn streak of her nature had insisted she walk out here herself rather than calling Rupert from the station and getting him to pick her up.  Before she’d learned to walk distances, this walk would have left her prostrate, but it wasn’t like she wasn’t sweating and heavy-footed with fatigue, and the straps of her pack were cutting into her shoulders._

_            But the country was beautiful, and she found plenty on which to feast her eyes as she walked.  Wherever the trees cleared, she could see the gentle undulation of land, full green even in high summer; Elisabeth was still accustomed to seeing the tall grass turn pale and the trees shedding leaves in protest by this time of year: probably some part of England was like her Midwestern terrain, but this was not it._

_            After some time it occurred to her that she would have no way of knowing exactly how the lane ended at the house; she was going to have to go by trial and error, or ask someone, assuming that the someones she was likely to meet in a deserted lane were friendly and not serial killers or anything.  Elisabeth rolled her head as well as her eyes._

_            As she crested a rise on the lane, she saw, unexpectedly, that there was someone within sight—a kid in a cap, from the looks of it, sitting on a stone wall where the lane widened and kicked off into another stand of trees.  The figure swung its feet, half-obscured by heavily rolled jeans, and turned its head unerringly to look in Elisabeth’s direction.  Ten feet further, and Elisabeth recognized her._

_            “Hey,” she said, her voice parched with the dust._

_            For answer _ _Willow_ _ jumped off the wall and trudged a few steps through tall grass into the lane.  “Thought you might walk,” she said, when Elisabeth was near enough to hear._

_            “It wasn’t too bad,” Elisabeth said, privately thinking she ought to get her head examined, and wondering incidentally if Willow could—or would—break into her mind._

_            “It’s not far to the house,” __Willow__ said, with a knowing calm that was not at all reassuring.  She gave Elisabeth a pursed little smile, a vestige of social currency.  Elisabeth wished this hadn’t been the way they’d met again; she was dusty and sweaty and completely at a loss for breath, let alone words.  At some point she was going to have to say the words:  _I am sorry for your loss_.  They were small and useless, like misshapen beads that would take no string.  Elisabeth tried to imagine what holding Rupert’s dead body in her arms would be like—her lungs turned to polarized mercury for a moment, and tears met sweat and stung at the edges of her eyes—but even that lay outside the realm of language.  “Words are but coins,” she murmured._

_            “Useful in vending machines,” Willow agreed.  “There’s not much talking goes on around here.”_

_            “But there is food, I expect?”  Elisabeth was the sort of thirsty that had hungry right behind it.  This provoked a sidelong half-smile from the other woman; _ _Willow_ _ tipped her head, and they continued on the way, two abreast and a roomy armspan apart._

_            The walk down the path to the house was oddly comfortable; they were going slowly, and the sweat began to dry on Elisabeth’s neck.  She hitched up her pack and wiped her hair out of her face for the umpteenth time; her glasses, she noted, were quite dusty now.  Willow, meanwhile, was the picture of artless health: Elisabeth supposed that the power she had gathered was enough to refresh the body, and then some; but her mouth was small and pursed like an unhappy child’s, which suggested that even great power was not enough to assuage grief.  She was wearing her own T-shirt, but the cap and the jeans had obviously been Rupert’s; a belt cinched the waist tight around her middle and the cuffs were rolled at least thrice.  On Elisabeth, they would have been rolled four times._

_            They rounded a curve, and suddenly the house lay before them, a stately dark building that looked like it had served several generations of comfortably tweedy Gileses; oddly, Elisabeth thought, taking in with private astonishment the unconcerned opulence, not much like Rupert at all._

_Willow_ _ trotted ahead to the front door.  “I’ll see if Giles is in the house.  We could have tea early.”  It occurred to Elisabeth that _ _Willow_ _ must be at least as uncomfortable as she, as she followed in the girl’s wake to enter the house._

_            She couldn’t smell much besides her own hot dusty self at first, but as her eyes adjusted to the dim light she caught the tang of leather and the immutable breath of stone.  Letting her pack slide down to the floor of the foyer, Elisabeth moved to the tall mirror on the wall and surveyed her reflection with resigned dismay._

_            “You made it,” he said._

_            She turned: and he was there.  For a moment she was overwhelmed by the pressing silence and suppressed anguish that seemed to permeate the house and the air around them; but there was pleasure in his face, though he was not smiling, and she lifted her hands in a little plaint of joy and welcome._

_            “Yeah,” she said._

 

*

 

“Xander!” Elisabeth cried aloud.

            The next moment she found herself breaking into a trot, then a run, up the pavement to her own front steps where he waited.  At the top of the steps she flung herself at him in a fierce hug, which he returned in full.  He smelled of travel and cheap coffee.  “God, am I glad to see you!” she said as she released him.  “I didn’t expect you.  You look great.”

            He did look well: despite the eyepatch and the weighted line to his shoulders that spelled both weariness and grief, an air of steady calm hung about him that was very becoming.

            “So do you,” he said, grinning.

            “Are you kidding,” Elisabeth said with a short laugh.  “I’ve got exorcism-hair and everything.”

            “Yeah, Will mentioned.  So you took care of the ghost?”

            “Yeah,” Elisabeth said, then grinned again and almost stamped her foot.  “Gosh, but it’s good to see you.  Let’s get inside and make some coffee.”  She felt at her pockets.  “I think Rupert’s got the keys.”  She turned quickly to watch for Rupert’s far more stately progress up the pavement, to find a young man she recognized staring avidly at her.  “And you are Andrew, I presume,” she said, though she knew perfectly well.

            “I’ve heard so much about you,” Andrew said breathlessly, seizing her hand and pumping it.  “About how you came here as a dimensional exile with forbidden knowledge, and fell in love with Mr. Giles, and had to go away to save everybody from—”

            “He didn’t hear it from me,” Rupert said wearily as he reached the bottom of the steps.  Elisabeth turned her stunned gaze to Xander, who just drew a long breath and looked at her helplessly.

            “—and the Council was all like, whoa, with your book-fu, and—”

            “Can we actually go inside and do this?” Rupert said.  Elisabeth recognized the caustic tone and said immediately, “Key me.”  She extricated her hand from Andrew’s grip and held it out; Rupert put the keys into it.  “So when did you guys get here?”

            “Dunno exactly when the plane landed at Gatwick,” Xander said as she unlocked the door and led the push inside.  “Oh-dark-thirty, pretty much.  But we haven’t been standing here long.”

            “Oh, which reminds me,” Andrew said, “I need to set my watch to Greenwich Mean Time.  Are your clocks set to—”

            “Our clocks are set to eating time, sleeping time, and tripping over books time,” Elisabeth said.  “Sorry about the mess.  And speaking of eating and drinking—”

            “We grabbed something on the way,” Xander said.

            “—I have to answer a serious call of nature,” Elisabeth finished.  “Feel free to start the coffee maker.”

            Xander grinned.  “Sure thing.”

            As she made for the bathroom, she saw Xander clap a hand gently on Rupert’s shoulder; Rupert touched the hand with a brief gesture and turned silently toward the kitchen.  Elisabeth became aware of a sudden weightless relief: and she closed her mind to questioning where it came from.

            The question of breakfast was quickly raised:  Rupert undertook to cook up some eggs and sausages, mostly, Elisabeth suspected, as an excuse to hide in the small kitchen.  Xander took up a position near the doorway (“no, I’ve been sitting down too long, really,” he insisted when Elisabeth offered to clear a chair of books and notes so he could sit), the best to converse with both Rupert and Elisabeth, who was duckwalking about the den, gathering books and collecting dirty cups and plates.  And over it all Andrew talked—about the British names for household items, about Elisabeth’s new laptop, about the fabled occult collection she had put together last year, about Oxford and exorcisms and love partnerships and Greenwich Mean Time….Elisabeth let Andrew’s talk wash over the surface of her consciousness, and found that it really was not that difficult to deal with.  Only once did she succumb to the temptation to mess with Andrew’s head, and that was mostly to get her own equilibrium back.

            “So,” Andrew said to her as she cleared off the table for breakfast, “you’re like, having the ultimate sci-fi experience.  Was it hard not messing up the timeline?”

            Involuntarily Elisabeth glanced into the kitchen; Rupert didn’t look at her, but his expression in profile became quite drawn.  “It wasn’t what I’d call a bed of roses,” she said briefly, ducking her head down to gather up a pile of papers from one of the chairs and uncomfortably aware of Xander’s dark eye.

            “That would be soo hard,” Andrew said, sitting down in the chair she’d just cleared and looking up at her admiringly.  “So back when you were in your home dimension, did you write any fic about Buffy and everybody?”

            Elisabeth choked.  Xander stirred and gave a warning cough, but Andrew went on.  “Because, I would have loved to read some of that.  Did you ship anybody?”

            “Andrew—”

            “Nah,” Elisabeth said, “I’m mostly a gen sort of person.”

            Andrew nodded sagely.  “Gen is so classic.”

            “And I wasn’t really active in _Buffy_ fandom,” she added, giving her head a little shake as if to clear it.  It had been so long since she thought of her life in those terms that she felt quite topsy-turvy.  “Had some plot-bunnies, though.”

            Andrew nodded again.  “But you’re like, a walking fic now.”  Elisabeth paused to stare at him.  “That must be so weird.  Like, you crossed dimensional lines, and there are all these stories that you know and we don’t, and you already know everybody and can, like, anticipate their every move—and there’s this burden that you carry, like oh my God Jean Grey, and you have to win everybody’s trust ’cause you’re—”

            Elisabeth was nodding.  “—the ultimate Mary Sue,” she said, with mischievous gravity.

            “Oh, no!” cried Andrew.  “No, no no!  I would _never_ let anybody call you a Mary Sue, not even _you_.  That’s just not right—”

            “Andrew, for God’s sake,” Rupert said, brandishing his spatula.  “Take a breath, would you?  And whoever the hell this Mary Sue person is—”

            Andrew turned around in his seat.  “That term got started in Trek fandom because of an original character in a story by Paula Smith in 1974, and over the years it got applied to basically any original character that somebody doesn’t like.  And fandom is so sexist, it’s like, it took years for them to invent the male term ‘Gary Stu’ but nobody really uses it—”

            Rupert was squinting in querulous incomprehension.  Xander said swiftly, “Nobody here thinks Elisabeth is a Mary Sue, Andrew.  She’s just playing with you.  Why don’t you help me get some plates out and we can set the table.”

            Rupert shot Xander a look of pure gratitude; Elisabeth swallowed her smile and went to set the last pile of books next to the shelves.

            Fortunately, breakfast put paid to Andrew’s spate for a little while, and then Elisabeth offered him the use of her laptop to check his email and catch up with his work while she got her shower and changed clothes.  When she came out, she found Andrew happily giving the “lowdown on the sitch” to Dawn on his cell-phone.  Rupert, meanwhile, was cleaning the kitchen.

            “Where’s Xander?” she asked him, grabbing a glass and filling it at the tap.

            “He volunteered to do the shopping,” he said, scrubbing at the range with a sponge.  “We’re out of milk.”

            “That was nice of him.”

            “Nice, nothing,” Rupert muttered.  “He wanted a quick getaway.”

            “Can’t have been a very fun plane trip,” she reminded him.

            “Why on earth did you egg him on, anyway?” Rupert said, scrubbing harder.

            “I didn’t egg him on,” Elisabeth said, knowing which ‘him’ was meant.  “He’s already got a full dozen in his carton.”

            Rupert wasn’t having any of it.  “What about that crack you made about Betty Lous?”

            “Mary Sues,” Elisabeth said calmly, sipping her water and putting down the glass on the counter.  “And the subject was bound to come up eventually.  As it is, he’s got it out of his system now—”

            “You don’t know Andrew.”  Apparently the bit of dirt Rupert was scrubbing at was extremely stubborn, but Elisabeth couldn’t even see it.  “He never gets anything out of his system.  He’ll go on and on and on and _on_—”

            With a convulsive gesture Elisabeth reached out and stopped his scrubbing hand.  “Rupert.  Would you just chill for a minute?”

            He yanked his hand away from hers, but did not return to scrubbing.  “So Andrew can go on at full spate if he likes, but I’m not entitled to a bit of—”

            “—hysteria?” Elisabeth finished.  “Well—”

            Rupert reddened.  “It’s not hysteria,” he hissed.  “It’s perfectly justifiable homicidal rage.”

            Elisabeth could not help a small eyeroll.  Her reaction did not, of course, help matters.

            “And I’m not at all impressed by your complacency,” Rupert said, in a low voice full of venom.

            “_Complacency?_” Elisabeth repeated.  She glared at him, knowing she had just taken the bait.  “I don’t know what that means,” she said, “but I suspect you’re just trying to take your temper out on me.  Unless you still resent my unearned familiarity with this dimension, you’ve got no reason to be upset with me for being friendly to him.”

            He went white.  “What do you mean, ‘still’?” he said; but Elisabeth, to save face and stave off tears, turned and exited the kitchen.  She felt herself on the verge of a towering temper.  Unwilling to lose her dignity in front of Andrew, she hid in their bedroom to put her shoes on, grabbed her satchel, and threw a few books in willy-nilly.

            She had not been going to give him the courtesy of telling him where she was going, but he appeared in the kitchen doorway as she was putting on her jacket in the front entry.  “Got to get some work done,” she said shortly, flipping her hair out from under her jacket collar and picking up her satchel.  “I’ll be back in a few hours.”

            He did not attempt to stop her, though she thought that his glare had more worry than resentment in it, and she swept out the door without another word.  Andrew paused in his phone conversation to wave her goodbye.

            _And if he kills him_, she thought as she shuffled quickly down the steps, _I won’t put up bail_.

 

*

 

Elisabeth stayed away long enough to indulge all the resentful, furious thoughts that felt like surfacing.  She turned pages without reading them and scowled at the words, thinking up scathing words of her own.  In the last few days, not only had he indulged an insulting worry that she had a death wish and/or wanted to run away from him (again), and rounded on her with fury for “snivelling,” as he called it, he’d now also attacked her for not letting _him_ snivel.  Clearly, some unspoken resentment of her was at work.  Elisabeth asked herself, in an attempt to be fair, whether she was upset that it was unspoken or upset that he had a beef with her at all, justified or not: she concluded that there was no way to know if it was justified if he wouldn’t tell her what it was.  Frustrated, she shoved the matter away and tried to focus her attention on her books.

            Concentrating on the books, however, only emphasized how poorly she had packed for this outing: the only work she really needed to be doing was her review of literature, the notes and books for which were back at home.  Elisabeth gave up after a while, tossed the book she’d been not-reading into her satchel, and went to take a brisk turn in Addison’s Walk.

            The sound of bells on the air reminded her, with a pang, that she had missed church that week.  She really ought to see Anne and let her know that she was still in the land of the living; and the fact that she had neglected to seek any spiritual direction in a while also made her uneasy.  It was, if she wanted to be perfectly honest, the reason she’d been avoiding Anne recently—as if the deficit in attention to her spiritual health could be rectified by hiding in shame from it.  But she knew what Anne would say if they got down to it.  She knew Anne would ask if she was still having the dreams.

            “It _isn’t_ running away,” she muttered out loud, as if debating it with the priest.  “I _can’t_ tell him what the dreams are really about.  And it’s not as if I’m lying to him—the dreams _are_ about the First, they aren’t really about him.  It would only hurt him needlessly.”

            Just a few short minutes ago she’d been fantasizing about doing just that—hurting him needlessly, in revenge for…what?  For succumbing to temper after a week’s worth of meager sleep?

            Elisabeth grew rather ashamed of herself.  “I’m not going to hold Andrew over his head,” she told herself.  “And I really ought to go and see Anne.”

            She had the perfect opportunity to turn her steps toward St. John’s Church; but instead of riding the crest of her urge to do right, she kept walking, and it was only when it threatened to rain that she pointed herself toward home.

            She arrived at her doorstep just as the drops began pelting down in earnest.  Pausing in the doorway to shake the rain off her jacket and wipe back the tendrils of her hair, she left her satchel in the foyer and went to the bedroom to change.

            It was as she was turning from the open closet to toss her glasses onto the bed that she caught sight of him in the doorway.  She turned away, unwilling to show him what she knew was on her face: the First had mirrored that look of despairing worry back to her often enough.

            “I am sorry, you know,” he said quietly.

            She stopped in the act of hanging up her shirt.  Then she turned to face him.  “I don’t know if I’m coming or going,” she said, frustration thick in her voice.  “The other night you thought I was desperate enough to entertain a death wish to get away from—God knows what.  Then today you accuse me of complacency.  And I can’t for the life of me figure out what one sin I’m committing that looks like both of them.”  She turned again and hung up the shirt, then reached for a T-shirt to pull over her head.

            He had come into the room, to sit on the foot of the bed; when she turned, he was picking up her glasses to fold in his nimble fingers.  “You’re not committing any sins,” he said, softly.  Out in the kitchen, she could hear Andrew’s voice interspersed with Xander’s, and the clatter of crockery; the smell of frying food reached her, and her stomach contracted hungrily.  “I,” he said, “on the other hand….”

            “You’re not committing any sins either,” Elisabeth said sharply, untying one boot and tossing it into the closet willy-nilly.  “You haven’t had any sleep in a week.  I could have remembered that sooner.”  She couldn’t look at him; instead she concentrated on unknotting her other boot lace.

            “It may be a reason, but it’s not an excuse,” he said.

            A suffocating impatience made Elisabeth look up.  “Rupert,” she began—

            “Elisabeth, —is there something—”

            “Are you just trying to take this all on yourself, or are you really wanting to make it better?” she said.

            “—is there something really wrong?” he persisted.

            She lost patience altogether.  “I don’t know, Rupert. Is there?”

            He looked at her helplessly.

            “Something’s upsetting you,” she said.  “I haven’t got a clue what it is.”  This was slightly disingenuous; her dreams were certainly a clue, but to what—it was far too diffuse to articulate.

            Apparently it was the same for him, because his response was a frustrated stutter.  “It isn’t—” he said— “it’s not—”  He stopped, then began again.  “It isn’t…really to do with you.”

            She breathed slowly in, then out.  “Is this you saying you don’t have anything to accuse me of?  Because the fact that we live together and share our burdens pretty much means that it has to do with me.”

            “I solved the problem of the house,” he said.  “I mean, we solved the problem of the house.”

            She waited for him to go on.

            His eyes were on his hands turning over her glasses in a delicate gesture.  “There isn’t—there isn’t anything else to tackle.” 

            She waited still, but he said nothing more.  Finally she ventured, “Except feeling diffusely crappy?”

            He raised his eyes to hers and sat silent.  She gave a very soft snort and let one shoulder fall.  “How I spent my summer vacation, by Rupert Giles, age 49,” she said.  “I went away to PTSD camp, and they sent me home with extra homework.  The best that can be said is I didn’t wind up with a concussion this last time around.”  She watched his face:  his lips twitched unwillingly.

            “He was messing with my head,” Elisabeth said.  “I obeyed the instinct to mess with his.  I wasn’t making a slap at you.”

            He cleared his throat and nodded.  “I did figure that out.  Eventually.”

            She tossed the other boot into the closet and went to him.  “Unless my nose deceives me,” she said, “dinner is served.”  She took her glasses from his hands, dropped a kiss on his forehead, and padded out to greet Xander and Andrew in the kitchen.

 

*

 

After a protracted dance of etiquette, Elisabeth persuaded Andrew that it was perfectly all right for him to take over the internet connection for the evening while she spread out at the dining table with her books and notes.  With Andrew thus preoccupied and Rupert doing the washing up, Xander took a chair at the table with her.

            “So what is this you’re working on?” he asked, toying with the cover of one of the books.

            “It’s a review of literature.  Basically, I’m taking all the books I’m going to talk about in my thesis and writing up notes on why they’re going to be important.”

            “And how many books are you going to talk about in your thesis?”

            “Eighty-six, last count.”  Off Xander’s incredulous look, she added, “Primary and secondary sources.”

            “Talk about your book-fu,” Xander said. 

            Elisabeth snorted.  “Believe me, there’s not much fu about it.  Getting this done is like pulling teeth.” She let out a heavy sigh, flipped open _Phantastes_ to her first sticky-flag, and began to copy the relevant passage onto a large index card.  “I had half of this done by January, but I ended up throwing the whole spring’s work out and starting over.  It was good to start afresh, but—you know.”  Xander said nothing, and she started again, though she hadn’t meant to.  “Couldn’t read my own writing in places.  In others, my writing was scarily legible.  And I couldn’t look at the Dadd prints at all.”

            “Your dad?”

            “Richard Dadd, D-a-d-d.  Did his most famous paintings from Bedlam Asylum.  Every detail is so exact that it’s like there’s no cohesion, no navigable meaning, no mental frame—it’s all foreground, no background.  Still gives me the creeps.”

            “Then why not leave him out?”

            She paused to give him a brief look.  “That would be copping out.  The thesis needs him.”

            Rupert passed them on his way to the den, a tumbler of scotch in one hand and the decanter in the other.  Elisabeth’s gaze marked him briefly, but she turned her eyes back to her book with only the briefest of sighs.

            Xander gave Rupert a furtive glance over his shoulder, as he settled himself on the couch with a newspaper and took a pursed sip of his drink.  “Is he doing that a lot?” he asked Elisabeth, in a low voice.

            She had no definite answer to give him: she looked up and gave him a mere twitch of expression, then looked down again.  A small misery pooled in her chest.

            “You want I should say something?” Xander persisted quietly.

            Elisabeth shook her head.  “He has to work it out on his own.  Best just leave him to it.”

            “What if he doesn’t?”

            She said doggedly, “He will.  Eventually.”

            Xander’s voice went even quieter.  “Has he hurt you?”

            Elisabeth gave her head a tentative shake, unwilling to characterize her worry that way.  “It isn’t—”  She stopped as Xander’s full meaning sank in, and looked up at him wide-eyed.  “No.  _No_.  It’s not like that.”

            Xander’s dark eye held hers.

            She wondered if she ought to be feeling piqued on Rupert’s behalf.  “Do you—do _you_ think he’s like that?”

            “No,” Xander said steadily.  “It’s just that I’ve been wondering what’s going on.”  Across the room Andrew laughed loudly at something that came up in his IM window, and Rupert winced and took a long sip of scotch.  “Willow told me what happened,” Xander went on, in the same low voice.

            “Oh,” was all Elisabeth could think to say.

            “’Course, Giles didn’t give her much in the way of details—she just said he told her that he tried to force you to tell him—”

            “—how the First would be defeated,” Elisabeth said dully.  Her dinner was sitting in a lump in her stomach.  “That was kinda different, though, you know.”

            “But it’s still on the table, isn’t it?”

            “Not really,” Elisabeth said.  She picked up her pencil again with a frown, but did not for a moment think that that would end the conversation.

            “Buffy says your best friend hit him in the face over it.  She asked him why, and all he said was that he hurt you.”

            “That was before she found out the extent of my knowledge, I presume,” Elisabeth said tartly.  Her stomach was really starting to hurt.

            “Yeah, well, Buffy was a little slow on the uptake on that one.”  She looked up at him in surprise.  “Will was in denial, Tara was keeping your secret, and Andrew assumed it as a matter of course, when he found out about you.”

            “And you?” Elisabeth said.

            “It was pretty obvious from the beginning,” Xander said.  “One of those sci-fi conundrums, like Andrew said.  Anya says—”  He stopped, and his gaze fell to the books.  Elisabeth resisted the urge to touch him.

            “It wouldn’t surprise me if I was still _persona non grata_,” Elisabeth said quietly, after a long silence.

            “It’s not that simple,” Xander said.  “It’s never that simple,” he repeated, quieter.

            “You get why I kept silent, though?”

            Xander’s eye lifted to meet hers again.  “Yes,” he said.

            “And Rupert got it too,” she said.  “He just—”

            “Cracked,” Xander said softly.

            Elisabeth nodded slowly, her gaze downcast.

            “He saw a lot of horrible things,” she whispered.  “Not that he’s mentioned word one about it, but I know that he did.  I’m willing to give him a long anchor chain.”

            There was a silence, then Xander said:  “Do you want me to stay here for a little while?”

            She looked up.  “That’s not in the plan.  You’re supposed to be headed to Capetown.  You’ve already been delayed.”

            Xander repeated, with emphasis:  “Do you want me to stay here for a little while?”

            She gave him a look.  “I would love for you to stay here a little while, but it’s not a good idea.”  She drew a deep breath and sat up straight, looking down at her books as if they’d become alien missives.  “You’re going to be here for a couple days, right?  That’ll be good.  I think he’d like to show you the house.”

            “I’m looking forward to seeing it,” Xander said, and there was real relief in his face.  “I like that Giles found something here.”

            She gave him a small pursed smile.

            “You think he’s going to be able to take having Andrew around here?”

            “Andrew,” Elisabeth said, “is going to live in Rupert’s flat in Bath.”

            “That’s the plan?”

            “If it wasn’t before, it certainly is now.”

 

*

 

Elisabeth gave herself the goal of two books completed before bedtime, but before she did that she shooed Rupert off the couch to make Xander a bed for the night.  For Andrew she got out an inflatable mattress and pushed aside three different stacks of books to lay it out.  “When did you get that thing?” Rupert asked, frowning at her myopically from his new nest in the armchair.

            “Oh, I got it a couple of weeks ago,” Elisabeth said, “when it first became apparent that we might be getting impromptu visits.”  She stepped back as the inflator fan kicked on and dusted off her hands.

            Xander was shaking his head.  “I should have booked us a hotel room.”

            “Well, there’s always tomorrow,” Rupert said, taking a delicate sip of his drink.

            Elisabeth ignored him and went to kick Andrew off her computer so that she could convert her notes to written sections.

            Xander sat down on the sheet-draped couch and attempted to relax.  “Would you care for any?” Rupert asked him, nudging the decanter at him politely.  Xander shook his head.

            Elisabeth said, without looking up from her efforts to disentangle her computer from its wires:  “There’s tea, coffee, and hot chocolate if either of you want some.”  She did not bother to turn around and catch Rupert’s hooded look in her direction: she knew it was there.

            “Ooh, hot chocolate,” Andrew said, and made for the kitchen.

            While Andrew and Xander and Rupert relaxed in the den with their drinks of choice, conversing idly (Andrew had, despite Rupert’s dire pronouncements, quieted as the day wore on), Elisabeth set to her work.  It was no more pleasant than it had been the last few days: every sentence came at a staggering cost, every paragraph shaped and reshaped itself as she wrote it, each form more awkward than the last.  At one point she paused, hands quiet on the keyboard, and wondered fretfully if she ought to go on some kind of antidepressant again.  _I’m not doing very well lately_, she thought.

            The voices of the men half a room away ought to have been comforting, but they weren’t.  The air of the place reminded her of numerous social engagements she’d gone to six months before, dreadfully attended by her own mocking mirror image—

            She shook her head, to clear it.  Across the room, Rupert was nodding into his glass at something Xander was saying about language barriers; his eyes were getting that look of clement unfocus that they had when he was far enough into his cups.  _Must be nice_, Elisabeth thought; she wasn’t much of a drinker, as her mind tended to interpret the diffuseness of being drunk as the burgeoning fuzziness of one of her attacks.  And, of course, given a choice between her sense of control and mental abandon, control usually won.  It was a wonder she’d ever let herself have sex, really. 

            Though they had never discussed it, she suspected Rupert thought she wanted him to have the same attitude toward mind-altering substances that she did.  Nothing could be further from the truth: she believed that his native generosity of spirit was at the back of all his doings.  Which wasn’t to say that his inclinations to drink under stress were altogether wholesome; Xander was right to feel concerned.  Perhaps he was also right that just letting Rupert go was a dicey plan.  But Elisabeth didn’t fancy weathering the quarrel that would surely result if she said something.  She didn’t, if it came to that, fancy weathering any quarrels at all.  She and Rupert were too much alike in that respect: they fought silence with silence and swallowed offenses whole, like Chronos eating his children to stop himself being overthrown.  If she was ever blunt with him, it was in desperation against her own nature.

            Back when she’d been traveling, it had become her custom to assume a confidence she didn’t have, and this had been made easier by the transient nature of her contact with people.  Now, she was as much at home as she was ever likely to be, and she was tired of always being ready for what was coming at her, in the same place always.  _Your works will end_, she had told Charles Bowen, _and mine shall extend_.

            _Just great_, she thought sourly.

            Elisabeth gave up after only one book, saved her work, and shut down everything for the night.  “I’m going to bed,” she told the others.  “Goodnight.”

            Tonight was not a night for the graces of darkness.  Elisabeth left her bedside light on as she settled down, but still it was hard to sleep, with the rise and fall of male voices plucking at the edge of her hearing.

            She must have fallen asleep, however, because when the old nightmare took her and she struggled out of sleep, the light was off and Rupert was beside her in the bed, firmly asleep.  She sat up, panting and disoriented; Rupert did not stir, thanks to the scotch.

            In the darkness, pained, alone, and frustrated, Elisabeth choked back hot tears.  She couldn’t tell whether she was angry at herself for dreaming and Rupert for staying asleep, or angry at Rupert for giving her the dream and herself for wishing he’d wake up and comfort her.  And at the very least, she thought, she ought to be able to figure that one out.

            She fumbled for the water on the night-stand and took a long drink, then put the glass to her hot forehead, breathing herself back into equilibrium.

            _It’s just a damn dream_, she told herself as she took another sip.  _And there’s plenty of reasons for your subconscious to be upset.  Didn’t you just kill off practically your entire paternal line?  A little freakage is called for, methinks._

            Not that she had particularly wanted to be reminded of that last.  Because _now_ she was mad at Rupert for being asleep.  She glared over at his softly-breathing hulk in the darkness.  What business did he have, drinking himself to sleep while _she_ was the one needing comfort?...Oh, that was unworthy of her.  It needn’t be either/or, she reminded herself.  They were both in a bad place.

            She put the water back on the night-stand and burrowed under the covers.

            It wasn’t going to be easy to send Xander on to Capetown.

 

*

 

In an unusual reversal, Rupert woke to find Elisabeth already out of bed.  He turned over, breathing in deeply, and tried to place the residual discomfort he was feeling; but he was distracted by a distant clattering in the kitchen.  He got up and pulled on his robe to investigate.

            Andrew was sprawled and slumbering on the air mattress, but Xander shuffled out of the kitchen, tousle-headed, patchless, and carrying a cup of coffee.

            “Where’s Elisabeth?” Rupert asked, clearing his throat.

            Xander sat down at the dining table, shuffled up a note lying there, and held it toward him.  Rupert took it.

 

_R—gone to run some errands and hit the library.  Probably gone all day.  Took the car.  —E._

_P.S.  Careful, there’s only one roll of t.p. left._

 

Rupert let out a long, heavy sigh.  Could you read between the lines if there was only one of them?  Unless you counted the line about the toilet paper (and if she was running errands, did that mean she was going to pick up some?), which he did not.  Of course, Elisabeth’s notes were consistent in their brevity no matter what mood she was in.  But Rupert had a feeling that his vaguely guilty conscience was not merely internal weather.

            “Did you see her?” he asked Xander.

            “Not really,” Xander said.  “I woke up as she was leaving.”

            It was no use.  Rupert couldn’t get hold of the correct perspective.

            “Would you,” he said, “mind very much if I ran an errand or two of my own this morning?”

            Xander shrugged.  “I think I’m going to play victim to jet lag this a.m.  So you might as well.  You gonna go out for toilet paper?”

            Until last spring’s foxhole familiarity at the house on Revello, Rupert had not been able to countenance such a conversation with Xander Harris; but now he merely sighed and rolled his eyes.  “Might as well.”

            He turned, and was about to make his way back to the bathroom for a shower, but Xander’s next query stopped him.

            “D’you think she’s all right?”

            Rupert turned.  “Who?  Elisabeth?” he said, to gain time.

            “Yeah.”

            “Why wouldn’t she be?”

            Xander shrugged and quirked his head noncommittally, but his one dark eye was eloquently steady.

            Rupert paused for a long moment, looking at him and thinking it over.  Then he turned and continued on his way to the bathroom, without reply.

 

*

 

The tea was cold in his cup by the time he’d finished relating the details of the haunting and exorcism.  He sat back and found a spot on Anne’s desk to deposit the cup and saucer.

            “Well, you’ve had rather an eventful few days.  And you’re quite sure the house is clear now?” Anne asked calmly.

            “I think so.  There are a few tests I’ll need to perform.”  Rupert laced and unlaced his fingers in his lap.

            “You don’t seem happy about it.  Still tired from the effort?”

            “I wish I knew,” Rupert said, letting his shoulders fall in a weary sigh.

            “But nothing went wrong?” Anne prodded him gently.

            “I don’t think so….”  But she left the silence to draw it out of him.  “…I wasn’t particularly pleasant to Elisabeth yesterday.  I hadn’t had any sleep, but that is no excuse.  But she didn’t really want me to apologize.”

            Anne raised an eyebrow.  “She said she didn’t want you to apologize?”

            “She said she didn’t want me…taking it all on myself.  I don’t know what that means, I’m sure.”

            “Could you hazard a guess?” Anne said.

            Warned by her dry tone, he swallowed and made the attempt.  “I suppose she doesn’t want me to avoid talking about it by claiming full responsibility.”

            “Talking about what?”

            “The problem.”

            “What problem?”

            He tossed his head aside impatiently.  “The reason we had the fight in the first place.”

            “So there was an actual fight.”

            He heaved a sigh, and explained about Andrew.

            Anne didn’t say anything at first.  He glanced at the priest’s face and saw that the characteristic dent had appeared between her brows, and she looked briefly over at her pen.  But instead of reaching for it, she said:  “So, if I understand it, Andrew’s cavalier reference to last spring’s troubles set you off, and since your strength was at a low ebb, you lost your temper and took it out on Elisabeth.  Is that correct?”

            He let his chin and his gaze fall.  “Yes.”

            “But an apology doesn’t make it better.  Why not?”

            He couldn’t get an answer past his thickened throat.

            “You say Elisabeth doesn’t want you to smooth it over by simply claiming to have perpetrated some monstrosity.  What is that about?”

            He raised his eyes to the ceiling and gave a great sigh.

            Anne sat back in her chair.  “When was the last time you discussed what happened last spring?”

            “Discussed it,” Rupert repeated dully, eyes still on the ceiling.

            “Yes.”

            “Well,” he said reluctantly, “—probably, I would say, right when I returned from the States.”

            “And that,” Anne said, with a deadly gentleness, “would have been prior to your first conversation with me.  Correct?”

            Rupert gave her no answer, which was answer enough.

            “So—” her voice was light— “you and I have been having these conversations for what? four months now?—but you haven’t yet discussed the central problem with Elisabeth.  I’m curious, Rupert, what _do_ you and Elisabeth say to one another about your visits to me?”

            He shot a hunted look at her, and snatched his gaze away.

            When Anne next spoke, it was in a tone he’d never heard before.  “Elisabeth…does know you’ve been coming to see me.  Does she?”

            Rupert stammered out, “I-I’m not sure.”

            “You haven’t told her,” Anne said flatly.

            He dared not answer that.

            There was a long silence: at last Rupert glanced over at her, and received an unpleasant shock.  Her face was turned away, but he could see that she was very pale.  As he watched, she pressed her lips hard together, recovering from some great emotion; then she turned and looked him direct in the eye.  He lowered his gaze.

            It took a few moments for the shock of catastrophe to clear through the silence.  Then Anne spoke, in a voice hardly above a whisper.

            “That was very badly done of you.”

            He winced under the words as under a lash, wondering how he’d managed to be so foolish as to imagine she could accept what he’d done.

            She went on.  “Are you laboring under the mistaken impression that I am a free agent in this matter?  That there is no conflict of interest?  I was willing to offer some direction to the conjugal partner of my friend only because I thought she knew and approved of it.”

            Hot shame flooded over his face.  “I’m sorry,” he whispered to the floor.  And he thought he couldn’t possibly feel worse, but then he looked up at her and saw that she was fighting back tears.  She looked away from him and pressed a fist firmly to her lips.

            “I’m sorry,” he said again, his voice breaking on it.

            She said, her fist still against her lips:  “You can’t come back here.”

            His throat ached.  “I—I understand that.  I should have seen….Please.  I don’t want—want you to think ill of me.”

            Anne rounded on him.  “Think ill of you!  I made a friend of you, and you—Am I to understand that you’ve been confessing your soul to me while saying nothing to Elisabeth at all?  Do you understand how abysmally foolish and _wrong_ that is?”

            Rupert cowered in his chair and nodded miserably.

            She snapped her gaze to her desk and began to straighten the piles of papers, her nose and eyes very pink.  “You have some work to do,” she said shortly.  “I don’t want you in my sight until Elisabeth knows you’ve been coming here.”  She turned her head and pinned him to the wall with her eyes.  “_Do you understand_?”

            He gave her many small nods, unable to break eye contact.  “Yes.”

            “Right.”  Anne turned away.  “You may go.”

            Quietly, Rupert got up and crept from the room, pulling the door to behind him.  But he could not resist glancing through the beveled-glass pane in the office door as he shut it:  he saw Anne drop her face into her elegant hands.

            Rupert could bear no more.  He decamped from the church as quickly as he could, without greeting any of the staff.

 

*

 

Elisabeth pulled up at Pyke’s Lea with her inner restlessness unabated.  She set the handbrake and got out of the car.

            She hadn’t really lied to Rupert in the note.  Well, the part about the library was a lie, but didn’t count because he’d see through it; after all, there was no use driving the car into Oxford without any place to park it.  And anyway, “library” had connotations of refuge for the both of them; he’d read the connotation and know she needed an escape.

            “Oh, what bullshit, Elisabeth,” she muttered aloud, and got out her housekey.

            Without the curse, Pyke’s Lea was quiet.  Not preternaturally quiet, just quiet with the occasional sigh or groan of ancient wood.  She stood in the foyer and took in the dignified slant of light through the corridors ahead.  This was now as much her house as Rupert’s; it contained the line of space-time that separated her and her lost lineage, and it _felt_ like something that belonged to her—the sort of place that irritated her superego to no end but still satisfied a deep part of her.

            She took her time exploring room by room, measuring with her eyes the length of sunbeams streaming through uncurtained, dusty windows, tracing chipped layers of paint on baseboards, triangulating water-stains on ceilings with her mental compass.  Some surfaces she touched: some she left alone, preferring the touch of sight.

            The rooms had an uncanny breadth of dimension, so that she didn’t feel cramped anywhere, even in the downstairs bathroom, which had been shoehorned in at the back of the main staircase.  Of course, in order to maintain that sense of space, they’d have to maintain simplicity in furnishing.  She’d have to discuss that with Rupert, though she felt sure he’d agree—in fact, their only danger in that area was the books.  Elisabeth knew all too well how deceptively easy it was to overflow shelving space, and she’d learned from packing up the Greenbill library how many volumes it would take to clutter the house.

            The conservatory looked dreadfully bare and forlorn.  Elisabeth hoped Rupert had a green thumb, because she certainly didn’t.

            The study, without its whirl of anguish and discord, was noble and comfortable; the detritus of their spells still lay on the ragged carpet.  Elisabeth paused in the doorway to refresh her intimacy with the room before moving on, seeking still.

            Upstairs, the rooms spoke of a long, empty wait for—what?  Lives should be lived here, she felt, but what that would look like she couldn’t project.  It should be simple up here, too—gentle colors, and warmth without overproliferation.

            At the head of the corridor she found the staircase hatch to the attic.  She had no idea if Rupert had been up there, and no idea what she might find, other than more nothing; but she hesitated only a moment before jumping up to catch the handle.  It took three tries, but she finally got hold of it and hung on it till it screeched and began to lower, showering her with dust and flakes of paint.

            With a rusty groan the staircase touched down to the floor, and Elisabeth paused to sneeze twice before putting her foot on the first broad wooden step.  She ascended carefully and slowly, eyes out for spiders or vermin.  She jumped and yelped at the sixth step, but it was only the husk of a dead spider confronting her at the head of the steps.

            As she rose up into the room, she understood that she had come to the place she’d been unconsciously looking for.  The attic covered the length and breadth of the house and was roofed over with arched struts—crucks, she believed the term was, if her memory of Rupert’s ramblings served—and was almost chapel-like in its quiet and space.

            _No safe places_, she’d told Rupert; but she’d ached for one.  Or at least for a place not soaked with the harmonic overtones of her personal holocaust, that she could also call her own.

            She walked down the center of the empty space, taking in the light from the three dormer windows and raising her arms into a wide prayer, daring a free breath as she disturbed the dust motes with her passing.  Oh, she had forgotten what it was to be alone with herself; had forgotten the presence of silence and the nameless quiet of her pulses in that presence.  Elisabeth sank down to the wide boards of the floor and put her head in crossed arms upon her knees.

 

*

In the pub, Rupert poked miserably at a basket of fish and chips.  He was anything but hungry.  It had been a while since he had so indubitably fucked up, and he wished he weren’t so damned familiar with the feeling.

            He drew a long breath and let it out in a sigh.  If he’d understood Anne correctly, she didn’t want to lay eyes on him till he’d made a clean breast of it to Elisabeth; but even then, he couldn’t apply to her for direction again.  Thinking it over, he believed there had been signs that Anne was moving toward weaning him off her advice anyway, but the naked truth of his—oh, might as well call it a deception and be done with it—had hurt her personally.  He hadn’t meant to do that.  Oh, if only he could trade the past twenty-four hours in for something in which he hadn’t been such a pillock.

            He lifted his pint glass for several long swallows.  Be nice to get pissed, but that would only lead to more idiocy.  He put down the glass and let his gaze get lost in the nutty depths of ale.

            Someone slid into the booth seat across from him, without any diffidence or hesitation.  Rupert jerked his head up, ready for indignant defense.

            “Hallo, Giles.”

            It was Robson.

 

*

 

Brian Whitaker mounted the steps of Elisabeth’s flat, whistling softly through his teeth.  A good sleep and a reality-affirming call to his parents later, he was his own man again.  Rupert’s car was gone, so possibly he had a chance of hanging out with Elisabeth alone; at any rate, he had in mind to invite her out for tea or something frivolous.  He reached out and knocked on the door:  _shave and a haircut, six bits_.

            It was answered by a pirate: a stocky young man with dark hair and one very direct dark eye.

            Brian reared back, blinking.  Had he got the wrong house?

            Before he could get over staring at the eyepatch and start talking, the man’s mouth twitched into a smile.

            “Arrr,” he growled.  “I be Xander Harris.  Who be you?”

            Brian blinked again.  “I be—” he shook himself, blushing— “I _am_ Brian Whitaker.  I’m looking for—”

            “Arrr, me mateys Giles and Elisabeth are not at home.” Xander Harris dropped the pirate accent and said politely, “Can I take a message?”

            “You don’t know where they’ve gone?”  Brian’s lips were quirking into a smile.  Hell, he dished it out often enough; fair enough to take it.

            Xander shrugged.  “‘Errands’ covers a lot of ground.  They left separately.”

            “I see,” Brian said.  He fixed Harris with a speculative look.  “You’re one of Rupert’s friends from California?”

            “That’s right,” Xander said calmly.

            “You seem to have fared worse in the battle than Rupert,” Brian said.  It was the easiest way he could conjure to let the man know he was safe with their confidences, but he wasn’t sure it didn’t just sound condescending.

            “I don’t know about that,” was Xander Harris’s cryptic answer.  And he stepped back in the unmistakable silent invitation of the vampire-conscious.

 

*

 

Despite her desire for quiet and solitude, Elisabeth had not particularly wanted to be confronted with silence.  It was in silence that her own demons had found voice, in silence that her desperate narratives had unraveled.

            But that fear had become increasingly irrelevant.

            Under the arches of the attic, Elisabeth closed her eyes and accepted the authority of the silence.  And knocking at the door of her heart came those things she had lost: her family, her friends, and the promise of a truncated history.

            _I miss you_, she said into the silence of her heart.  _And I’m so damn sorry_.

            Noiselessly, she wept.

 

*

 

“And what is this now?” Rupert inquired sourly.  “The scene with the prodigal son or the scene with the thirty silver pieces?”

            “It needn’t be either,” Robson said, unruffled.

            “Then you want me to sell Buffy out for free,” Rupert said.

            At this Robson did roll his eyes.  “Nobody wants you to sell Miss Summers out.  You persist in having this regrettable us-versus-them mentality, Giles….”

            “Hmm, wonder why that is?” Rupert said, taking another long sip of ale.

            True to Watcherly form, Robson did not acknowledge any wrongdoing, but merely gave him a long look.  “I’m not here to persuade you away from your Slayer,” he said quietly.  “I’m here to make contact with you.”

            “On behalf of the Council.  Or what’s left of it.”

            “There are some of us who are regrouping, yes,” Robson said.  “There are some who say that it is you who are calling yourselves the Council.”

            Rupert snorted.  “A network of practical communications for the purpose of guiding those who are Chosen is hardly a Council of any type.”

            “But, thanks to your resident witch, it’s you who’s got most of Council fund reserves.”

            “Money does not a Council make, either, as you know perfectly well.”

            “Well, our own aims are by necessity fairly modest,” Robson said, with an aridity that was not meant to conceal his pique.  “We are regathering as much knowledge as we can.”

            “Knowledge, as in research resources—or knowledge, as in surveillance?”

            At this, Robson gave a heavy sigh.  “Giles, for heaven’s sake.  We are not mounting a military operation against your girls.”

            “They’re not _my_ girls, and she’s not _my_ Slayer,” Rupert said.  “The old ways are done.”

            “Then you’re…perfectly—what’s the word—copacetic with the new ways?  No disagreements, all harmony?”

            Rupert narrowed his eyes at the man.  Damn him.

            “What do you want from me?” Rupert said.

            “Nothing very much.  A little information.”

            “Such as?”

            “The most recent estimate of the number of new Slayers, for example.  Also, results of your reconnoitering in various hot spots round the world.  Things of that nature.”

            Rupert popped a chip into his mouth and chewed.  “No.”

            Robson was beginning to show his impatience on his face.  Rupert had learned to look for the little crease over one eye to deepen, the chin to sharpen.  “Giles…in case you have forgotten, we are all on the same side.”

            “The same side?” Rupert said mildly.  “Then I presume things have changed since Buffy called the Council looking for ‘a little information’ about a small matter we informally called ‘the Harrowing.’  If I recall correctly, she was deemed unworthy of a single iota of ‘information’ and told to bugger off.”

            “Giles—”

            “And who was it who defeated, practically single-handed, the First Evil?  Certainly none of the weapons _you_ had at your disposal were put into her hands.  No:  I’ll be damned if I give you information.  I’m shocked you have the face to ask for it, though I ought to know better.”  Swift, revivifying indignation was coursing through his veins.  He raised his head and gave Robson the full force of his glare.

            There was a silence.  Then Robson said quietly, “We could work together.  Forces for good shouldn’t fight one another.”

            “Why not?  They do it all the time,” Rupert said bitterly, and lifted his glass to drain it.

            Robson got up from the booth.  “Think about it, anyway.  One colleague to another.”

            It was on Rupert’s tongue to say that they were colleagues only because each of them had cheated death several times; but he kept silence, and Robson disappeared quietly from the pub, leaving him alone with his frustration.

 

*

 

After his unsatisfactory lunch, Rupert trailed home to find Xander folding up his bedding to give Brian Whitaker a place to sit.  Andrew was washing their lunch dishes and chattering about Oxford (“I didn’t know it was pronounced ‘Maudlin,’ that’s just so _British_”), and Elisabeth still had not returned.

            “Rupert,” Brian said, with his usual cool nod.

            “Brian.”  Rupert turned toward the bathroom, murmuring, “This day just gets better and better.”

            When he returned, Xander said, “Elisabeth’s not back yet.  But what do you think about going out to the house?  I’d like to see it.”

            “We could take my car,” Brian said.  “It’s parked out on the street.  Except there’s a big pile of papers and books in the back; we’d need to move them to the boot to accommodate all four of us.”

            “I can do that,” Xander said.  He moved toward the door.

            “It’s the black VW a few spaces that way,” Brian said, jerking his thumb in the direction of the street.  “Harris—” Xander paused long enough for Brian to dig out his keys and toss them over.  He reached out and caught them easily, as if he hadn’t spent a month relearning how.

            “Thanks,” Xander said, and disappeared with a jingle of the keys.

            Rupert found himself frowning helplessly over these new developments, not least of which was Brian’s and Xander’s instant rapport, not to mention the fact that none of them had waited to find out if he wanted to go to the house at all.

            “Oh, God, that reminds me,” Andrew said.  “I’m going to have to learn how to drive on the left side of the road.  Oh my God.  Is it hard?”

            Brian shot Rupert a look of bewilderment—_who_ is _this person_?—which made Rupert nip a smile in the bud.

 

*

 

The four men arrived at Pyke’s Lea to find Rupert’s car parked there.  “So this is where she’s got to,” Brian said.

            Rupert was staring at the house with a faint frown that could have meant apprehension or mere thoughtfulness.  Slowly, he started toward the front walk, and the others followed.

            “Is that timbering a façade, or the real wall?” Xander asked.

            “It’s the real wall,” Rupert answered, absently, and Xander gave an impressed grunt.

            The door was unlocked.

            “Wow,” Andrew was saying.  “Wow.  This is so cool.  Are we going to see where you did that exorcism spell?  I did this exorcism once, where we took a pin and—”

            “Hush,” Rupert said; Brian raised his eyes to the ceiling and drew breath.  “Elisabeth?” Rupert called.

            They moved further into the house, past the foyer.  “Elisabeth?” Brian called.  “Rupert, d’you think she’s—”

            “I’m upstairs,” Elisabeth called faintly from above.  “I’ll be down in a minute.  Hang on.”

            Rupert stared up the main staircase for a moment, then began, deliberately, to climb it.  Andrew followed, but Xander caught him deftly by the collar and drew him back.

            “Let’s have a look around,” he said significantly to Brian, who gave a resigned nod.

            “Study’s this way,” Brian said, tipping his head in that direction.  “The remains of the spell should be there, if Elisabeth hasn’t cleared it up.”

            “Awesome,” Andrew said.

 

*

 

Elisabeth had fallen asleep.  She woke to a changed light in the attic and raised her head blearily from her arm, then pushed herself to a sitting position and rubbed at her face.  It felt slightly puffy after the crying and the unaccustomed nap.

            Below, outdoors, she heard the dull sound of a car door slam, then another.  Then multiple voices coming into the house.  They’d come looking for her.

            She didn’t really want them up here, so she crawled to the staircase opening and shouted down, to let them know she was all right, and coming soon.  Then she sat back on the dusty attic floor, trying to collect her sleepy wits.

            She heard Rupert’s footsteps on the main staircase; heard him pause at the sight of the opened trapdoor.  She waited, and presently his head appeared in the attic, then the rest of him.  He paused to brush away the dead spider and settled himself on the second step down.

            “Hi,” she said.

            A faint, sad smile came to his face as he took in the attic with his gaze, then looked at her.  “Hi,” he said.

            “Giving them the tour?” she inquired.  “Or were you worried about me?”

            He gave a little shrug and looked away, the corners of his mouth taut.

            “What’s the matter?” she said softly.  “You look sad.”

            He opened his mouth, but it was a few moments before he finally spoke. “Anne’s very angry with me,” he said quietly.

            Elisabeth sat up, blinking at this unexpected development.  “Really?  Why?”

            He didn’t look at her.  “Because she realized I hadn’t told you I’ve been going to her for direction.”

            Elisabeth sat still, absorbing the full implications of the statement.  “So,” she said finally, “that’s where you’ve been going lately?  To the church?”

            Rupert nodded and shot a miserable glance into the corner.  “She’s very angry with me,” he repeated.

            “Hmm.  I’m not surprised.”

            “Are you?  Angry with me, I mean.”  He still did not dare to look at her.

            Her heart went out to him.  She got up and went to sit next to him on the second step down, and slipped her hand into his.  “No,” she said.  “You probably should have told me.  But I get why you didn’t.  And I’m glad you went looking for good advice.  Anne’s a good spiritual director.”

            “Well, she’s not _my_ spiritual director anymore, now that I’ve made a balls-up of it,” Rupert said bitterly.

            Elisabeth leaned in and kissed the side of his head consolingly.  He let out a little sigh and let his head rest against hers.

            They sat like that for a little bit, then he raised his head and glanced around the attic with more interest, taking in the arch of the roof and the darkened rafters.  He glanced down at her; she let him look in her eyes for a moment before laying her head against his shoulder.

            Downstairs, they could hear Andrew’s voice carrying up, describing some spell or other that he’d done in the past.  When his voice hit a lull, Elisabeth stirred, and rose with his hand still in hers.

            “Shall we give them the tour now?” she said, with a small smile.

 

*

 

Elisabeth let Rupert gravitate toward Xander during the tour, choosing instead to hang back with Brian and show him the things she knew he’d find interesting.  Brian proved somewhat knowledgeable about floor plans from the era, as he had briefly considered studying to be an architect.  “I thought you considered studying to be a thespian.”

            “Well, that, too,” Brian grinned.  “But it’s a don’s life for me, at the end of the day.”

            Andrew turned from his rapt attention to Rupert’s and Xander’s conversation about detecting wall studs to say confusedly, “You were going to study to be a lesbian?”

            “_Thespian_, Andrew,” Elisabeth grinned, as Brian choked.  “A theatre major.  But I reckon there haven’t been any flying monkey incidents in the O.U.D.S., eh?”

            “Certainly not,” Brian said, plying his handkerchief to his watering eyes.  Andrew grinned back at Elisabeth.

            They rambled over the house and grounds, pointing out beauties or problem spots, until at last they found themselves in the gravel parking area.  A trip to the local Indian restaurant for takeaway was mooted, and plans made to reconvene at Elisabeth’s flat.

            “I’ll follow you,” Elisabeth agreed.  “But first,” she added in a low tone to Rupert, “I’d probably better go and see Anne.”

            He sighed.  “Yes, you probably better had.”

            She went up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek.  “See you later, then.”

            The four men all waved at her as she got into the car.

 

*

 

Elisabeth parked at the flat and walked briskly across the Bridge and over to St. John’s.  When she arrived, however, she was told that Anne had gone home early with a headache.  Going out of the church, she looked toward the vicarage and almost lost courage.  But she drew a breath as of girding her loins, and crossed the street, before she could talk herself out of it.

            Anne answered her knock—_shave and a haircut, six bits_—carrying a teacup and wearing her fuzzy green wrapper over a jumper and yoga pants.  Elisabeth shot her a wry, self-deprecating smile.  “Hey.”

            She was relieved to see a faint light of humor in Anne’s face, as she stepped back to let her in.

 

*

 

“Well, I knew he was going _somewhere_,” Elisabeth said, blowing on the surface of her cup of tea.  “I’m glad he wasn’t just going down the pub, you know.  It means he’s at least _trying_ to cope, which with Rupert you never can tell if he’ll bother.”

            Anne sighed.  “Well, I’m as angry at myself as I was at him.  I ought to have seen that coming.  Really, if I had a quid for every time a directee dissembled, I’d retire in style.  It’s more that…well, he’s a good man and it was easy to befriend him.  And I knew better than to try to give direction to a friend under circumstances such as these.”

            Elisabeth nodded, commiserating.  “Anyway, you sure put the fear of God into him.  He didn’t waste time telling me as soon as he saw me again.”

            A faint smile came to the priest’s mouth, then dissolved into pensive unhappiness once more.

            “And,” Elisabeth added, shifting in her chair, “it probably didn’t help that I’ve been staying away.”

            Anne looked up at her and nodded; Elisabeth dropped her gaze to her teacup.  “I mean,” she went on, “I don’t think I’ve been doing well lately.  Stressed; discouraged; ashamed of the fact.” She lifted her head.  “Rupert tell you I just killed off half my paternal ancestry?” she said, with a little laugh.

            “Yes,” Anne said.  “That’s quite a feat, you know.”

            “It hasn’t been a particularly good month overall.  But the house is cleansed, anyway, and it’s as much mine as his now, in the ways that matter.  Poor Rupert.”  Elisabeth mingled a sigh and a smile, and took another sip of tea.  “He did want that so much.  But probably not in the way we got it.”

            “No, indeed.”

            “You should come to see the house sometime, now that it’s clear of ghosts.”

            “I’d like that.”  Anne smiled a little.

            “We could have tea in the study.  Wait till you see it; there are paintings on the ceiling we haven’t deciphered yet.”  Elisabeth drew a long breath and settled her teacup in its saucer.  “Well, I can’t stay—Xander and Andrew are staying with us for a few days and there’s a plan for Indian takeaway.  But I’ll come back soon.”

            She put down the tea, and Anne rose to walk her to the door.  “Perhaps you’ll come next Saturday?” Anne said.  “It’s a blank spot in my diary at the moment.”

            The two women paused in the foyer to look at one another.  “I’ll come,” Elisabeth said, clearing her throat huskily.  She reached impulsively and hugged Anne with a strong grip.  “I’ve missed you.”

            “And I you.  And—tell Rupert—it will be all right; he needn’t be afraid to visit—only, not in my office for tea and advice.”

            “I’ll tell him,” Elisabeth said.

 

*

 

When Elisabeth got home it was twilight.  Pink-cheeked from the walk, she pushed into the flat bringing crisp air with her.  “Hallo,” she said, stilling the male voices around the coffee table.

            “We saved some chicken tikka masala for you,” Andrew said.

            “Thanks.”  She shrugged out of her jacket.  “Gotta go to the bathroom first.”

            Her men were lounging comfortably with the food spread out and mostly-eaten over the coffee table; Xander had pulled up one of the dining-table chairs and was straddling it.  He, Rupert, and Brian were nursing beers; Andrew had a strawberry soda.

            Rupert looked over at her, heart beating: she gave him a small, grave smile, and he relaxed as she hurried down the hall.

            They had returned to the anecdote Brian was telling when a sharp cry of dismay reached them from the bathroom.

            “Damn!” Rupert said, upsetting the cat from his lap.

            They’d forgotten to get toilet paper.


	6. Marred Foundations

_There is no end, but addition: the trailing_

_Consequence of further days and hours,_

_While emotion takes to itself the emotionless_

_Years of living among the breakage_

_Of what was believed in as the most reliable—_

_And therefore the fittest for renunciation._

—T.S. Eliot, _Four Quartets_

 

_“I have a gift for you,” Rupert said, when they were alone in his room at last._

_            “Oh, Rupert, you shouldn’t have done that.  I didn’t bring anything for you.”_

_            “You did,” he said.  “You came here, because I asked you.”_

_            She gave him a grave, arch look, and moved further into the room._

_            He went to the armoire and drew out a box wrapped in silver paper; she went toward him in spite of herself, and he held it out to her hesitantly, seized by a sudden diffidence.  “I hope you like it,” he said.  “I wanted you to have something nice.”_

_            He didn’t add, “for once,” or “of your own,” and Elisabeth was grateful for that alone.  She undid the wrapping on the box, deliberately, and lifted off the lid._

_            “Oh,” she said, after a few stunned seconds.  She reached in and lifted out his gift with gentle awe._

_            It was a kimono of a dusky rose silk—real silk, her fingers knew by the touch, not what passed for silk these days—that hung from her fingers like water.  She lay it on the bed and for a long moment feasted her eyes and fingertips on its opulence._

_            “You like it,” he said, in a husky whisper._

_            She nodded speechlessly; then shot him a sidelong glance that brought the light into his face._

_            “Shall I try it on?” she said, with a quiet smile._

_Tucked up in the darkness of her bed, _ _Willow_ _ tried desperately to sleep.  She had chosen a bedroom across the house from Giles’s, long before Elisabeth’s visit had been mooted: she wanted to avoid raw connection every bit as much as Giles did, and even with the distance she could sometimes feel the helpless horror of his dreams, try as he might to insulate her from them.  And she suspected that he too had an unwanted access to the moments of her unguarded anguish.  She had welcomed Elisabeth’s visit for the distraction it could provide, though everything she was being taught by the coven suggested that it was not an impulse she should listen to: she was supposed to be owning her grief and remorse, not sidestepping it._

_            Still, it was a relief to have Elisabeth here:  she was now as anxious to share Giles as she had once been to claim his full attention—what was that Chinese curse, something about getting what you wish for?  She had said, _Now I have you all to myself_, and the weight of that granted wish reverberated through her with prophetic doom._

_            And Elisabeth was making Giles happy.  It hurt to watch, but the part of _ _Willow_ _ that most understood generosity was moved to faciliate that look in his face as much as possible.  She had once known that look from the inside._

_            Maybe if he wasn’t hurting, she wouldn’t have to._

_            Caught up in these thoughts, Willow did not notice at first the sensations reaching her from across the house: but the sharp tang that rose on her tongue startled her into awareness, and she almost sat up in bed with the panic of it._

_            Of course; that had been the whole point of her going to bed early.  That had been the whole point of inviting Elisabeth here in the first place.  But oh—she had forgotten the mingled heat and joy, the shining sweetness of it.  Willow burrowed down under the covers and crammed her pillow over her head, but that was a futile gesture.  Every avenue was pain—breathing life into others’ happiness, far preferable to continuing her aborted effort to end the world, could only hold up the mirror to her own loss._

_            Or was she the mirror?  Her body seemed to say so._

_            It took _ _Willow_ _ a long time to fall asleep; but even so she slept far sooner than the lovers on the other side of the house, who did not succumb to sweet exhaustion till the silver early dawn of an English summer._

 

*

 

A keen, slanting November rain was falling as Anne Langland peered through her windscreen to find the lane turning for Pyke’s Lea.  She had been to the house once before, weathering the discomfort of seeing Rupert and mending fences; she had found the house very pleasing and homeworthy, and this had had the effect of doing away most of Rupert’s hunched mea-culpa demeanor.  And she herself had been greatly relieved: the story of the haunting and exorcism had predisposed her to be nervous about setting foot in the place.

            Today she was on a happier errand—she was bringing Elisabeth her birthday present, and Elisabeth was going to serve her tea: they had just got the kitchen in operating order.  Elisabeth had spent an afternoon at the vicarage a fortnight ago conspicuously not shedding tears about what she called the Plumbing Disaster.  They had put it right at great effort and expense, and from things Elisabeth let fall, Anne had found out that Rupert had spent more time than usual at the pub over it.

            He had also, she discovered, been fighting with Buffy again.  Elisabeth had come home to the flat one day to find him having an unusually acrimonious shouting match with her over the phone.  Smacked in the face by the sheer keen bitterness of his voice, she had made an about-face and went to hide herself in her study carrel at Magdalen for the rest of the afternoon.  Elisabeth had related this with the same placid air and wry twist of the mouth, giving nothing away. 

            “But what were they fighting about?” Anne had asked.

            “It had really got beyond anything coherent by the time I showed up,” Elisabeth said.  “And I didn’t ask him.  But I suspect it started because he told her that Robson had contacted him.”  Elisabeth explained about Robson and the Council, though much of it Anne already knew.

            _And I didn’t ask him_: that was the telltale sign that made Anne sigh.  Developing a maternal instinct over one’s directees was the devil and all.  She was just going to go to Pyke’s Lea and have tea with her friend.

            The house as she approached it was wrapped in a grey shawl of rain, the brick dark with wet and the smoke from the kitchen chimney swirling down over the gable, pulled down in an embrace with the falling drops.  As she set the hand brake and flipped up her hood preparatory to getting out, she saw the door open and Elisabeth appear on the threshold.  Anne grabbed her parcel and popped the car door open to dart toward the front walk.

            “Oh, gosh.  I was just going to get the umbrella for you,” Elisabeth was saying as she gained the front porch.  “It’s really started coming down.  Tea’s ’bout ready.  Mind the paint cans as you come in.”

            There were as yet no coathooks or coat-tree, so Elisabeth took Anne’s coat and draped it neatly over the newel-post of the staircase as they went in.  Anne retained her parcel; carrying it, she followed Elisabeth into the kitchen, where a small, heavy table waited, set for tea, a beautiful thing amidst a general clutter of paint-chips and folding rulers and wires.  Anne set her parcel down on one of the mismatched chairs and took the place at the table Elisabeth showed her.

            With an unconscious youthful dexterity Elisabeth plucked the kettle from the stove, filled the warmed teapot and brought the pot to the table.  “Help yourself to the cheese and the tarts,” she said, “while this steeps.”

            “My goodness.”  Anne chose a small wedge of soft cheese, a tart, and a biscuit.  “All this wealth you serve me, and it’s _your_ birthday.”

            “It’s my pleasure,” Elisabeth said.  And indeed, as she lifted the pot to pour a serving of tea into each delicate flowered cup, she looked very pleased.

            “Have you any special plans for the day?”

            “I believe Rupert plans to take me out to dinner.  D’you take sugar?”

            “A spoonful, please.  I suppose Rupert is working in town?”

            “I’m not sure where he is—poncing moodily about somewhere.”

            As if on cue, they heard a rattling at the conservatory door; it scraped open, and Rupert’s staccato footsteps tracked them to the kitchen.

            “Elisabeth…oh, hallo,” Rupert said.  He was wearing paint-stained jeans and equally-paint-stained boots, and the drops on his shapeless canvas coat bore witness to the unrelenting rain.  “I forgot you were going to have tea.”  His gaze skittered away from them at the table, and lit on the merry blaze in the kitchen fireplace.

            “Elisabeth,” he said, looking alarmed, “that chimney hasn’t been swept, you know.”

            “Hasn’t it?”

            “No.  It hasn’t.”  He frowned at the flames.

            “Oops,” Elisabeth said sheepishly.  “Shoulda thought of that.”

            He did not say _Yes, you should have_, but the words rang in the room nevertheless.

            “Well,” he grudged, “I expect if it was going to start a fire it’d have done so by now.  All the same, I’d bank it if I were you.”

            “Good plan.” Elisabeth got up and went to carry it out.

            Elisabeth’s swift action made Rupert’s peevish irresolution even more pronounced.  “Well,” he stammered finally, “I’m going to go and take care of some things at the flat.  Would you mind if I take you with me to the hardware store before we go out?  There are some tiles I want you to look at.”

            “Certainly,” Elisabeth said, with the utmost docile calm.  Her hands did not falter in their task at the fireplace.

            Her energy-absorbing opacity seemed to bring Rupert to decision.  “Right then, I’ll be off.  Good day to you, Mother.”  Anne nodded in return.  “See you later.”

            Elisabeth nodded, and he made good his retreat.

            When she returned to the table, Elisabeth allowed herself a small sigh and picked up her cooled tea.

            “So that’s what you were telling me about?” Anne asked mildly.

            Elisabeth’s lips tightened.  “More or less.”

            Anne was perfectly willing to let it go.  After all, she had come here, and Elisabeth had invited her, to drink tea, eat pretty things, and banter of nothing in particular.  But her friend’s eyes were lidded over secret unhappiness, and Anne found herself saying instead:

            “Perhaps you’d like to talk about it?”

            Slowly, Elisabeth nodded.

 

*

 

There had been no open conflict; nor had Elisabeth’s worries that Rupert would not want her to be part of the renovation project materialized.  But a persistent uneasiness had wound its way around their works and days like an asp biding its time to strike.  Rupert’s non-rhythm of balanced competence and warped despair seemed to go on without reference to Elisabeth’s own; but she suspected they fed on one another nonetheless.

            “He’s not used to the way I behave,” she told Anne.  “A couple of times he got in a critical mood and I curled into a tight ball.  Nobody else he knows does that.  They fight back, or get hurt and show it, or take it to heart and make amends.  But I don’t.  I do what _he_ does: I put up the armor, pretend it’s all right, and seethe with secret resentment.”  She heaved a sigh.  “The hell of it is, I don’t think it’d be going any better if I behaved more like Buffy.”

            “They’re still not getting along?”

            “It’s a bristling détente.”

            “If you don’t approve of your response to criticism, why don’t you experiment with changing it?”

            “Change it?” Elisabeth said, making it almost a cry.  “Can the leopard change his spots?”

            “One-two-three-where’s-your-breakfast?” Anne said.

            “Ha,” Elisabeth said.  “If only camouflage was so efficient.”

            “But he knows you.”

            “Damn it, yes, he knows me.”

            “And I doubt,” Anne said gently, “he’s hunting you.”

            Elisabeth wasn’t altogether sure of that.  There was something he wanted of her, some kind of response she wasn’t giving that he was pushing for.  But nothing had taken shape, either on her side or on his, and spats, or sexual passion, provided only a temporary relief.

 

*

 

There had been the day they had stripped the old varnish from the floorboards of the front hall.  Elisabeth had been fighting a cold, and after a week of wrestling fruitlessly with her thesis she had welcomed the chance to break off and help Rupert with the project.  They had been snappish with one another all week, and as far as the house was concerned, the bloom was definitely off the rose: they had passed from excited dreaming to laborious doing, and they had very nearly quarreled over who last had the ring of paint chips.  At any rate, Rupert had delivered a stinging rebuke which Elisabeth countered with a caustic denial, and she had indulged in a quiet cry in the back garden.  Rupert, that night, indulged in somewhat less salty fluids for comfort.  But he had come in late that night, as Elisabeth was trying to read herself to sleep, and sat at her side on the bed.  His mute misery, and her own fragility, reminded her of that night long ago in Sunnydale when they had sought awkwardly to comfort one another.  “Bloody awful day,” she ventured; for answer he took her hand and stroked it, still silent.  And much later that night, when she succumbed to the old nightmare, he curled protectively around her as she fought and wept, and held her close until, needing breath in the stuffy darkness, she arched gently, guiltily away from him and sighed her way back into sleep.

            The next day, however, the air had changed.  Autumn was beginning to make itself felt in the form of grey, clinging clouds and the occasional shrill gust of wind: the perfect sort of weather for repetitive physical labor.  The grey, homely eternity seeped into their pores as they worked; their hands made more sound than their voices, and beneath the rhythm Elisabeth had felt an energy simmering that was not yet, and was not guaranteed to become, a full frisson of feeling.

            She wasn’t about to push for it, however.

            But at noontime she caught his glance as she stripped off her gloves and wiped at her hands with a rag.  A sharp whistle of wind funnelled through the front door and set the newspaper trembling for a brief moment.  As she drew up her flannel sleeve to swipe at her nose, Rupert said quietly:

            “Do we have time to go back to the flat while this dries?”

            “Why do we need to go back to the flat?” she said, pulling out a crumpled tissue to wipe her nose more thoroughly and pretending to ignore the telltale note in his voice.

            “Because I want you,” he said simply.

            Elisabeth stopped feeling the chill.  She nipped a smirk in the bud and repeated, “Why do we need to go back to the flat?”

            He lifted his eyes and tipped his head; she could see him suppressing an elated smile.  “Well, I neglected to take thought for precautions, you see.”

            She retorted, “If it’s contraceptive precautions you’re thinking of, I’ve already taken them.”

            His gaze snapped to her face.  “What?”

            This time she did smirk at him.  “You gave me a look this morning that I thought could be interpreted in that direction.  Nothing like thinking ahead—or thinking _with_ your head—or thinking with the head on your—”  He put his fists on his hips and glared at her, and she desisted with a grin, and went past him to drop the rag in the bucket.  As she passed behind him she dealt him a stinging slap on the backside.  He jumped.

            She missed the bucket with the rag, but before she could bend to pick it up, he captured her hand and began to pull her steadily away after him.

            In the hallway he paused.  “Where?” he said.

            “Study?” she suggested dubiously.

            There was not a stick of furniture in the study, but nevertheless he turned and led her at a quick pace to the study door.  She thought he was going to draw her inside, but instead he backed her up swiftly against the broad doorjamb and kissed her with force, his long hands cupping her face.  Instantly she was alive with heat, as if some unspoken word between them had created her passion by mutual fiat.

            Despite his urgency he took his sweet time kissing her before letting his hands drift down to collect her shape and anchor them together against the doorway.  Then matters progressed swiftly enough: at the same moment she felt/heard the rasp of his unshaved cheek against hers as he moved his kiss to the hollow behind her jaw, and the unceremonious slither of her jeans down to her ankles.  Not to be outdone, she worked clever hands down to his waist, and his jeans soon followed, then his shorts.

            His hands were on her bare skin: she felt the angle of his thumb smooth down the inside of her thigh, making her tremble and arch into him.  A little growl from him curled into her ear.

            She felt his hands sweep down to gather her in from behind, and moved with him, twining her arms up over his shoulders and reclaiming his mouth for a long, savored kiss.  He broke the kiss for a concerted effort to lift her up round his waist; the first attempt failed, and for the second she reached up and her fingertips found the carved ledge of the architrave overhead, and clung hard.

            It was hard, hot work, pressed between him and the doorway, and desperately uncomfortable: she begged him, “Oh…_more_—”

            And he complied.

            If Elisabeth had wanted any proof that the sun had not set on their passion, she could hardly have asked for more than what followed next:  every muscle in her body, every fiber of her, was taut and concentrated in a sheen of sweat and pain and need, and he anchored himself hard against her and pressed, gasping, again and again and again—

            There followed a confused moment of shaking effort and fumbling grasp; then the hot relief came, and she shut her eyes and breathed out rejoicing.  She held him, nearly losing him, with her knees till it was all over.  His knees trembling, he let her down and they stood propped up against one another, panting.

            With her eyes shut, she slipped her hands around his waist, buried her face against his shirtfront, and held him; and he was quiet.  Presently his hand moved, to stroke her mussed hair: a pain of longing rose in her, for the time when the landscape of their love had not been narrowed to such small chinks of tenderness.  And yet she was at peace.

            It was useless to confront the confusion.  She leaned her head back and caught his eye.  “All right?” he said softly.

            “Very,” she said, and went up on tiptoe to kiss him.  He kissed her back; and they turned to clean themselves up and resume their clothing.

            They had lingered on the front steps afterward, drinking tea from a thermos and contemplating the wild grey quiet of the country before them.

            “Well,” Elisabeth said at length, resting her wrist on updrawn knee and blowing gently across the surface of her steaming tea, “looks like we’ve christened the house.”

            He cast his eyelashes down over a grin.  “Yes, it appears so.  Not precisely the christening I had originally planned.”

            “No,” she agreed, deep humor in her voice.

            The wind whistled up, and fresh leaves skittered down from the trees in the orchard.

 

*

 

“Is Buffy still planning to come to visit?” Anne asked.

            “Yes, the plan’s still on,” Elisabeth said, swallowing hard.  “The Plumbing Disaster almost finished it, but we convinced Rupert that it’d be good to have Buffy here regardless.  We’ve saved some heavy lifting tasks for her,” she said lightly, “and Buffy told me on the phone she’d be glad for a chance at something to do with her hands.”

            “I haven’t met her,” Anne said, “but she sounds a very formidable girl.”  Anne’s natural sense of formality would have led her to call Buffy “Miss Summers,” but she grasped instinctively that that address didn’t fit this young woman, the last of the singular Slayers.  “One girl in every generation,” Rupert had repeated to her once; “she alone will stand against the darkness….”  “She does have help,” Anne had said mildly, and Rupert had startled and flushed.

            “Are you nervous?” Anne asked now.

            “Yes,” Elisabeth said.  “Buffy doesn’t much care for me in a general way, you know.”

            “I can imagine,” Anne said, regarding Elisabeth with her thoughtful aquiline look.

            “And you know it’s bad when she’d rather talk to me than to Rupert.  It hasn’t been very much fun.”

            “If it promises to be so unpleasant, why have you all been so assiduously pushing the plan through?” Anne asked gently.

            “Because it’s the last long shot for peace,” Elisabeth said, simply.

 

*

 

The decision to have Buffy out to Pyke’s Lea for an extended visit was not made in a day.  It had germinated soon after the exorcism, when Rupert had established Andrew in the Bath flat and seen Xander off to Africa from Southampton.  “Keep him out of trouble,” Xander had murmured to Elisabeth amid their bear hug on the dock, “if you can—” rendering the wish something more than facetious.

            Elisabeth had snorted; but this was mostly to stave off tears.

            Rupert was thoughtful on the drive home.  He and Xander had been deep in conversation for most of Xander’s stay, poring over blueprints and visiting lumberyards.  Elisabeth had been left to entertain Andrew, a task to which she was quite well suited: by the time Andrew’s abode had been established at Bath, he had taken to following Elisabeth around, puppylike, asking questions and getting into things.  It had pleased her to show him Oxford, and watch his breath and voice arrest at each new ancient sight; she had taught him pub etiquette and helped him choose a tweed jacket.  She had even, whimsically, packed them lunches to take to Magdalen one day and drawn a Union Jack on Andrew’s with red and blue markers, to distinguish it from hers; on all lunches since, Andrew had drawn his own.

            In the car, riding back to Oxford, Elisabeth missed Andrew’s chatter, and said so.  “You’ll have it back weekends,” Rupert had said dryly.  “I’m meant to be training the little blighter.”

            But the contact with Xander had whetted his appetite to share things with the Scoobies, especially Buffy, and he had, Elisabeth realized, eventually lit upon Andrew as his link with the others—showing Andrew things he was working on in this room or that, explaining where the herbal cupboard was going to go, which swords were going to hang in the back corridor, how the attic pull-door was going to be altered to make the house defensible from above in (God forbid) some unnamed extremity.  He knew, and Elisabeth knew he knew, that Andrew would pass everything he heard and saw to Dawn; and Dawn would give a precis of it to Buffy, so that Buffy would know what he was up to without his having to make himself vulnerable enough to explain it.  Elisabeth found this arrangement rather discomfiting; but it was better than nothing, and considering how strained Rupert’s conversations with Buffy had grown, she knew it was next to impossible to alter it for the time being.

            But Rupert had grown restless with the scheme.  It was of a piece, though Elisabeth had not made this explicit even to herself, with his veiled urges to poke her into some unguarded response, even if it meant combat.  Rupert wanted insulation; he wanted unmitigated full contact.  He wanted to meet people at removes; he wanted to come to grips with them directly.  Elisabeth understood instinctively this push-me-pull-you state of his, but that did not make it any more comfortable to live with.

            Rupert worked feverishly on his house, and fitfully on the work of the Slayers; occasionally he fell into a dismal lassitude and disappeared off to a pub to drink slow and deep.  Elisabeth did nothing to stop him, though she did go so far as to make a secret trip to see the landlord of his favorite haunt, give him her card, and make arrangements for him to bill her should Rupert ever need to be sent home insensible.  This had not happened yet, but Elisabeth felt that it was only a matter of time.

            Once, alone with Andrew in the house, Elisabeth had stopped work on a wainscot to drop her paintbrush and chuff into helpless sobs; Andrew, looking frightened, had reached out tentatively to give her shoulder many small pats.  For once, he asked no questions; Andrew was naïve, but he wasn’t stupid.

            It began to look like the house would be partially livable by Christmastime; Rupert’s and Elisabeth’s bedroom was nearly finished, the kitchen and upstairs bathroom had been made quite usable if not sleek and fully fitted; the study floor had been resanded clean enough to move in a desk and a couple of filing cabinets for Rupert to work.  It was then that Rupert had casually mentioned to her, one evening when they were resting from their respective labors, flopped comfortably together on Elisabeth’s couch with cups of tea, that he was thinking of having Buffy out to the house when he’d got it livable enough for them all.  Elisabeth buried her stinging eyes in her teacup and murmured that she thought it sounded like a wonderful idea.  Buffy had been approached, with utmost diplomacy, and to everyone’s relief had readily accepted the idea of spending Christmas at Pyke’s Lea.

            Then came the Plumbing Disaster.

            “I don’t know why I even try,” he said miserably, looking down at his half-submerged boots and holding up his palms, looking much like Moses might have done if the Red Sea had failed to part.

            “Well,” Elisabeth said, surveying the damage while wiping the spatters of slime from her glasses on the tail of her sweatshirt, “it’s certainly set us back about a month.  Good thing you hadn’t got the furniture out of storage.”

            His answer was a mere grunt.

            Elisabeth put her glasses back on and was confronted with a cloudy smear suffocating her vision.  “Oh, this is pathetic,” she muttered, and took them off.

            He was not looking at her.  “Pathetic is the word,” he said, letting his hands drop in disgust.  He shifted one foot, sending ripples of water across the soggy carpet, and gave a deep sigh.  “Well, I suppose I’d better call Buffy and tell her it’s all off.”

            She forgot her glasses and stared at him.  “_Why_?”

            “Well, look at this!”  He flapped a hand at the mess, his voice shooting up into the Querulous Giles Register.  “D’you call this hospitality?”

            “I don’t think it’s as bad as it looks,” she said, rubbing her glasses on her sweatshirt again.  Rupert made an incredulous noise, but she went on.  “I think with a concerted effort we can at least get a bedroom for Buffy put together within a week of her arrival, either side.  And even if we can’t, Rupert, the whole point of having her out here is to give her a break from administrative stuff.  You can take her to Bath or London or even Somerset and still accomplish that.  Not to mention,” she added, gesturing with her glasses, “the benefits of a little physical labor she might get from helping us here, as we agreed before.”

            Unlike Elisabeth, he had not bothered with the attempt to clean his glasses, which was probably just as well.  He glared at the dripping mess through the specks of slime on his lenses.  “A little physical labor,” he said, “not a month of disgusting drudgery.”

            Elisabeth’s mouth quirked.  “Even a month of disgusting drudgery might do her good.”

            He gave her a withering look.  “How?”

            “Well, I’m no perfect judge, but I think being in a position to offer you some help in the domestic arena might stroke her ego a little bit.”  She gave him a dry smile.

            “At the expense of mine,” he grumbled; but he made no further protest, and the plans stood.

 

*

 

“What’s in the package?” Elisabeth asked now.

            “Your birthday present,” Anne said, with an arch smile.  “Shall we go somewhere where there’s more light for you to open it?”

            Anne was rewarded to see Elisabeth’s face lighten.  “Study would be good,” she said, and Anne followed her out of the kitchen, carrying the parcel.

            “I wrapped it in brown paper instead of wrapping paper,” Anne said apologetically, as she handed it over by the French doors of the study.  “I didn’t want the rain to harm it.”

            “I’m very fond of brown paper,” Elisabeth said.  “It always reminds me of that Chesterton essay, ‘A Piece of Chalk.’”

            Anne laughed, recalling the essay.

            She had wrapped it in two layers of brown paper, and Elisabeth chuckled as she removed the second one; but her laughter stilled when she pulled the last layer away and saw what it was.

            Anne had been working steadily on the Visitation of St. Elizabeth icon she had begun while Elisabeth was staying at the vicarage in the spring.  It had not been Anne’s original plan to give it to her, but the holocaust of Elisabeth’s battle with the First Evil had stayed in Anne’s mind as she worked, until she no longer remembered the point at which she had decided to make a gift of it to Elisabeth.

            “I finished it just last week—just in time,” Anne said softly.  “It matches you.  Prophecy, exultation—pleasure in God’s works—the beginning of a great thing….”

            Elisabeth’s mouth was very small and taut at the corners, but she was not crying.  She nodded a thank-you.

            After a long silence, Anne whispered, “It isn’t just Rupert…is it.”

            Elisabeth shook her head, still gazing at the gold and the colors of the icon.

            Anne waited.

            Finally Elisabeth cleared her throat and spoke.  “I don’t think I told you…how I got here.”  The words came low and strained.  “In my home dimension…I was in an earthquake.  My—I don’t know what you call it—astral self was sent here.  Rupert worked for a week to find the spell that would send me back.  He worked very hard…I was ill and he took care of me.  He sheltered me.  He did all those things—not because he felt some special pity for me—but—that’s just what you do, on the Hellmouth, and he knew it.  His moral compass points true north, you know—that’s why the Council couldn’t handle him.

            “He offered…to do what he could for my illness in the meantime.  He couldn’t give me therapy or medicine, but he could teach me to meditate.”  Elisabeth drew a shivering breath that shook her frame, and went on.  “He convinced me to go deep, to uncover what I was protecting.  He thought that might help to heal whatever—breaches—were causing the trouble in my mind.  We sat alone in a room…and with his voice and a few crystals he guided me under.”

            She paused to take a dry swallow.  “It was a disaster.  I don’t think—I don’t think Rupert ever really got over what it did to me.  He blamed himself, of course.”  She shivered and drew herself up, as if to face an attacker, and faltered:  “What I found, in the deepest place, under everything in me, was….”  She stopped.

            “‘An horror of great darkness?’” Anne said, quietly.

            For the first time Elisabeth looked up, stricken, unable to speak.  Finally she nodded, and opened her mouth.  New words came, low, quick.  “He tried to make me believe—when I was able to tell him what I saw—that it only represented my fear.  That that great Nothing was what I feared, not what was.  He said, ‘I know you are human.’  I told you that before, I think.”

            “And this,” Anne said, “this is what the First Evil was using against you?”

            Elisabeth shut her eyes.  She did not even need to nod.  “It wasn’t a representation of anything.  It just _was_.  It just was the Nothing, was the evil.  That’s what my soul is made out of.  Do you know I cried when I read that Teresa of Avila book you gave me?  I went inward, and found not light but darkness—”

            “Not your soul, Elisabeth.”

            “How do you know that?” Elisabeth opened her eyes to bore into Anne’s own.  “How do you know?  You weren’t there.”

            Anne spoke as gently as she could.  “You didn’t go looking for your soul.  You went looking for the thing you were protecting.  That’s what you found.”

            “But it was real.”  Elisabeth’s hands gripped the edges of the icon, knuckles paling.

            “Of course it was real.  Think, Elisabeth.  Where do you find the Nothing in the Scriptures?”

            She had gone white, but she mustered an answer.  “Abraham’s dream?”

            “Yes.  Where else?”

            Elisabeth looked at her, blank with fear.

            Anne gave her a small smile.  “‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  Now the earth was without form and void, and the Spirit hovered over the waters….’”

            Elisabeth raised a dubious eyebrow.

            “Nothing is the womb of creation,” Anne said, but Elisabeth interrupted.

            “It wasn’t a _happy_ place.”

            “No; it wouldn’t be.  It’s a place of danger and vulnerability.  Of course you would have an instinct to protect it.  Especially if, as you say, you were divided across dimensions.  But it’s not down to you to create something out of nothing.  That’s not your job.”

            “The First said—” Elisabeth’s voice scratched on the word— “the First said it would make the darkness rise up and take me over.”

            “That,” Anne said dryly, “was the sort of clever ruse one might expect—to make you focus on your own vulnerability, rather than the First’s vulnerability.”

            “Which is what?”  Elisabeth had calmed, but Anne sensed that the anger ran deep: she was still clutching the icon, and her voice was quiet and flat.

            “It is also subject to creation.”

            There was a long silence while Elisabeth thought it over, her gaze fixed on the empty middle distance.  “I want to believe you,” she said softly at last.

            “Don’t,” Anne said.  “Find out for yourself.”

            Elisabeth recoiled visibly.  “When you’re ready,” Anne added gently.

            Elisabeth’s shoulders lowered, a horizon of misery.  “If I were ready now,” she said, “I probably could get rid of the dreams.”

            “You’re still having them?”

            Elisabeth nodded.

            “What does Rupert say about that?”

            “He doesn’t know.”  Elisabeth looked away.

            “Doesn’t know you’re having them?  Or—”

            “Doesn’t know what they’re about.”  Elisabeth’s voice threaded to a whisper.

            “Elisabeth,” Anne said gently, “the longer you wait to tell him, the worse—”

            “I know.”  Elisabeth held the icon close, her face a mask of sorrow.  “I know.  But I can’t.”

            Anne heaved a small sigh.

            “I mean, look at him,” Elisabeth said, with a small mordant toss of her head.

            It was hard to disagree.  “Quite,” Anne said.

            “You’ll pray for me, won’t you?” Elisabeth relaxed her hold on the icon to look at it once more, a wistful look softening the bleak lines of her face.

            “I always do,” Anne said.

 

*

 

“You cleaned up nice,” Elisabeth said, smiling across the table at him.

            He raised his eyes from the task of draping his napkin over his lap, caught the pleasure in her face, and relaxed.  “So did you,” he said.  “Happy birthday.”

            She raised her wineglass and gave a flirtatious shy of the head.  “I feel so grown up,” she said, playfully.  “Candlelight dinner and everything.”

            “Were you ever not grown up?” he smiled.

            “I’m working my way backwards,” Elisabeth said, and he snorted a laugh.

            “How old are you now?”

            “Seriously?  Thirty-one.  Twenty-nine, if I’d been born in this dimension.”

            He fixed her with a thoughtful look.  “It must be odd, having two ages.”

            Elisabeth shrugged.  “In the end it doesn’t seem to make much difference.”

            He had said “medium-dressy” in response to her query about the dinner plans, so she had put on a flowing black dress and topped it with a cream Angora sweater, and piled her hair on her head.  He seemed to find it as pleasing as she was finding him in his suit, because he paused in lifting his soup-spoon to say, “I like your hair like that.”

            She reached up a hand to touch it.  “It’s growing out.  I’ve been thinking of cutting it off.”

            An involuntary whimper broke from him, and she smiled.  “You like it long?”

            He blushed.  “Well—it’s _your_ hair, of course.  But yes.”

            “Rupert,” she said, “I do believe you are a closet romantic.”

            “And you,” he replied, “are manifestly beautiful.”

            Elisabeth ducked her head, flushing.  “My goodness,” she murmured.

            “I want you to know,” he went on forcibly, “that I deeply appreciate the way you’ve put up with me these past few months.  I know I—”

            But Elisabeth was shaking her head vehemently.  “There’s no ‘putting up with’ between you and me, Rupert.  I don’t believe in it.  I abominate mere tolerance,” she said, with a sudden passion that brought a startled look to his face.  But the startlement deepened to amazement when she went on:  “I love you,” and added, quieter, “I don’t say that lightly.”

            “I know you don’t,” he said, after a second of stunned silence.  “In fact, I think it’s the first time you _have_ said it.”

            It was Elisabeth’s turn to be startled.  “Haven’t I?”

            He gave a brief shake of the head.  “I didn’t—I didn’t mean—”

            “You did _know_, though, didn’t you?” she said, wide-eyed.

            He raised his eyes to hers without lifting his head, and gave a very small smile.  “Yes,” he said.

            She drew a long breath.  “Good.  I was worried there for a second.”

            “Happy birthday,” Rupert said softly.  “I love you too.”

 

*

 

They came home that night to a familiar hopeless mess.  Months of shoehorning two people’s busy lives into one small flat had resulted in piles of papers and books that had themselves become part of the furnishing, festooned with bits of clothing and the odd uncollected teacup.  “Oh, this place needs cleaning,” Elisabeth groaned.

            “Better when we can move into the house,” Rupert agreed dismally.

            The cat miaowed from his sinuous path round Elisabeth’s ankles.  “Don’t rub it in,” Elisabeth said to him.

            The answerphone message light was blinking.  Rupert went and pressed the play button, and Buffy’s short, peremptory voice filled the room.

            “Giles, it’s me.  I know it’s late, but I need to talk to you about the Morimoto girl.  I’m not getting anything from Faith.  I tried your cell but I think you’ve got it turned off.  Call me whenever you get in; I’ll be up.”  Beep.

            Rupert sighed.  “I’d better take this.  You mind?”

            Elisabeth shook her head, and Rupert disappeared into the bedroom, pulling his mobile out of his pocket.

            Kicking her shoes off under the lamp-table, Elisabeth dropped onto the couch with a sigh.  The cat leapt upon her lap, and she ran a long stroke over his spine and down his tail.  “It’s a good thing I’m wearing black,” she told him.  For answer the cat stretched forward and sniffed at her nose, then settled down on her lap, purring.

            Without upsetting the cat, Elisabeth reached across the couch to draw over her present from Anne.  She pulled off the loose brown paper and held it gently, tracing its outlines with her eyes.  Anne had done wonderful work: the long lines of the women’s faces and robes spoke simultaneously of suffering and joy, the eyes dark, the gold haloes coruscating from their braided hair.

            _It’s like you_, Anne had said, and, _it’s not down to you to make something out of nothing_.  If only she could trust that.  It had been startling to hear Anne voice the shame she’d been hiding, in such a matter-of-fact way: _an horror of great darkness_.  Perhaps this fear inside her was not unique.  Perhaps the proof of the pudding was that she had survived.

            “Happy birthday to me,” she whispered.

            To her relief, as she listened, the timbre of Rupert’s voice in the bedroom did not escalate.  The small strain was still there, but he was calm and speaking at a normal deliberate pace.  Elisabeth hoped whatever was happening with the Morimoto girl was not too horrific.

            Presently Rupert’s voice ended, and after an interval in which she heard the movement of clothing, he opened the door and called softly:  “I’m headed for bed.  Are you coming?”

            “Yeah, just a minute,” she called back.

            The cat bounded off her lap, but she paused, still staring at the icon, for a long moment before getting up.

 

*

 

His hands were tender, and his voice was deep and ardent, and he was stroking her inside and out, in a rhythm of contact that gathered them both together and flung them into compassless joy, and her hands were buried in his hair, as his had been tangled in hers when she took it down, and she was naked and unafraid.

            But when sleep rang down darkness on her consciousness, she stifled and struggled, and the old dream came again, and his hands were hard and unmerciful and his voice was despairing venom, and her own darkness was roaring in her ears and she couldn’t stop it—

            “It’s all right, love.  It’s all right.  It’s just that bloody dream again.  You’ll be all right in a moment.”  Rupert was murmuring to her, and his hands were gentle once more.

            She choked on a dry sob.  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she gasped.  “I’m sorry.”

            “You’ve nothing to be sorry about,” Rupert whispered soothingly.

            “Yes I do,” Elisabeth sobbed.

            She was still naked, and so was he: his skin was warm, hers cold.  He gathered her in from behind and limned his body to hers, and stroked her long hair back from her face, over and over.

            She was so tired—so tired; it was easy to give in and let him comfort her, so easy to let him soothe the fear away with his voice.

            “I have to tell you—” she mumbled.

            “Mm?”  He had not understood her.  Had she been incoherent on purpose?

            Her shivering was subsiding; his hand stroking down her arm.  “You can sleep again now,” he said softly.  “You’re all right.”

            Elisabeth acquiesced, and breathed out, and returned to sleep.


	7. The Bone's Prayer

_And what you thought you came for_

_Is only a shell, a husk of meaning_

_From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled_

_If at all.  Either you had no purpose_

_Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured_

_And is altered in fulfillment.  There are other places_

_Which also are the world’s end, some at the sea jaws,_

_Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city—_

_But this is the nearest, in place and time,_

_Now and in _ _England_ _._

_—_T.S. Eliot_, Four Quartets_

 

_Elisabeth had the window open, to listen to the quiet.  It had been a long time since she spent more than a few hours in the country—lifetimes since she had lived there.  She had never thought of herself as primarily a city person or a country person; she figured she was mostly an anyplace person, as long as she had some reasonable elbow-room._

_            But she had forgotten about the quiet.  It was not so much an absence of sound as a presence of silence, leavened by the occasional sounds of wind and flora and fauna, pouring in through the open window.  Elisabeth held her eyes in her book and let, for once, the habitual knot untie itself within her._

_            She lay on the bed, the bed that had been Rupert’s and was now theirs, wearing his robe, holding the book up on her stomach.  A faint breeze from the window fingered her damp hair.  _

_            She knew he was there before she saw him: he appeared in the doorway with the same silence as that coming in the window from outdoors.  His presence lifted her heart, and her gaze went soft on the words she was reading._

_            He moved, unhurried, to the bedside, and sat down to put her feet in his lap.  His hands were warm and long, caressing her, sole and instep, toes and arch.  She raised her eyes above the level of her book: his gaze was cast down, the planes of his face gentle, as in—not prayer exactly—Elisabeth’s experience of prayer was more strained effort than blessed rapture.  But something of blessing reposed in Rupert’s face.  There was no need to speak, or even to meet eyes._

_            Presently he leaned over and slid open the nightstand drawer; as she watched, he plucked out a nail file-orange stick, a scissors, and lotion.  Amusement began to play about her lips, but she still said nothing as he began to work on her feet, which were warming under his touch.  After a while she went back to reading, as relaxed as he while they each amused themselves._

_            At the end of his impromptu pedicure, he reached again to rummage in the drawer.  “Damn,” he said.  “I thought I had some varnish.”_

_            “You’re in the habit of keeping nail polish in your drawer?” Elisabeth teased him._

_            “I was,” he said, “when I had lovers.  Long enough ago now that any varnish I had would be bound to have gone bad.  Well, your feet are quite lovely as they are.”  He cupped them between his hands, and looked up to find her gaze steady on his face.  “Does it bother you?” he said suddenly._

_            “Does what bother me?” Elisabeth asked, though she already knew._

_            “That I’ve had lovers.”_

_            Her mouth twitched.  “Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said that men want to be a woman’s first lover, and women want to be a man’s last romance.”_

_            She watched him: his lips quirked, and he gave her a level look._

_            “And if,” she went on, “we were to adopt that set of goals, we’re fairly halfway there.  But I don’t suppose it matters.  We’re here now, aren’t we?”_

_            Unbidden the memory came, of that first night when he came back.  They had spent the night hours loving, and Elisabeth woke next morning to find him next to her, the sheets twisted anyhow around him, his feet hanging off the end of her bed, his face a study in perfect peace; and she marveled.  And of course then she thought; last night they had not bothered to do much thinking.  It was tempting—not fate, she supposed, but tempting _something_—to be happy like this.  It was one thing to come together frantically and desperately before, as he had said, he had another brush with the end of the world; it was quite another to contemplate a whole vista of loving, demarcated by she knew not what.  Suppose he survived what was coming next—what then?  Theirs would be a life of endless dodging, and she might as well accept that straight off._

_            “Rupert,” she had whispered, tracing the edge of the sheet over his waist, “how long do I have you for?”_

_            His eyes moved under their lids.  “Today for certain; possibly tomorrow,” he had murmured._

_            A grin slid over her face despite herself.  “That’s not what I meant,” she said, regretfully._

_            He left his eyes closed, covered her hand with his.  “I know.”_

_            Now, her eyes cleared to find his gaze searching her face.  “You are right,” he said.  “We are here now.  Don’t look so troubled.  We have this; it can’t be taken from us.”_

_            “You’re going to start quoting _Casablanca_ in a minute,” Elisabeth teased him; but at the same moment she reached a hand toward him.  Gently he lifted the book out of her other hand, closed it, and set it on the nightstand; then took the hand she had stretched to him and inched himself up to curl close to her.  She nestled her face under his chin (she had discovered the perfection of that fit already), and closed her eyes, and did her level best to banish thought._

 

*

 

Rupert appeared in the doorway, his hand beating a tattoo on his leg.  “Well?” he said peremptorily.  “Aren’t you ready?”

            Elisabeth looked up from her book.  He had been pacing in and out of the bedroom all day, pausing to straighten a bookshelf or clean out a cupboard, and had changed his shirt twice.  She had been looking forward to getting him out of the flat and having some peaceful time to herself.

            “I didn’t know I was going,” she said, keeping her voice mild.  “I thought I was going to stay here and fix dinner.”

            “Oh—well—if you don’t want to go—”  He disappeared again, just as abruptly.

            She let out an aggrieved sigh and dropped the book.  For a moment she sat formulating a riposte mainly centering on the notion that it could not possibly be as much trouble for him to ask her to go and give him moral support as he was currently making for himself by being all passive-aggressive about it.  But she abandoned the mental rhetoric and got up to go into the bedroom, where he was fussily checking the contents of his pockets, twice looking at the screen of his mobile to make sure there were no messages.

            “We can order a pizza,” she said, leaning against the doorframe.  “And pick up a salad.”

            “Oh, that’s all right,” Rupert said, flipping through his pocketbook.  “You don’t have to come, if you’d rather not.”

            “I’d _rather_ you were in your right mind, is what I’d rather,” Elisabeth retorted, drawing a hooded glare from him.  “It won’t take me five minutes to put on my shoes and get my coat.”  Without giving him any more opportunities to dither, she suited the action to the word.

            When they were finally on the road, Elisabeth pulled down the passenger-seat visor to put up her hair in its little mirror, ignoring Rupert, who was wrapped in silence, his chin high.

            “Would you like me to stay in the car while you fetch her at the gate?” she asked, once they’d reached the motorway.

            “No,” Rupert said, briefly.  “I’ll park; we’ll both go in.”

            Elisabeth sat back with a little private sigh.  She didn’t exactly fancy trotting along behind Rupert through a busy airport terminal.  He knew perfectly well that crowds and disorganized noise made her anxious, and in his present mood he was bound to stride faster than she could keep up.  Oh well, she thought; she’d let herself in for it; she could have taken his offer to go alone at face value and enjoyed the quiet.  Best go through with it.

            As they sped toward London, rolling clouds of rain moved in and spattered the windscreen, damping the silence.

 

*

 

“Here,” Buffy said reluctantly.  “_Don’t_ go crazy with it.”

            Dawn tucked the credit card into her pocket.  “Like you did, in France?”

            “That was different.”  Buffy didn’t bother to explain how.  She unzipped her suitcase and flipped it open to re-inventory her shoes.

            “Speaking of quasi-parental psychoses, why does Willow have to be here to babysit me, again?”

            “For the fifty-billionth time, she is not here to babysit you.  She’s here to coordinate an exchange.”

            “Yeah, right, like she couldn’t do that from Rio.”

            Willow cleared her throat from her perch on the bed.  “São Paulo?  Not Rio.”

            Dawn ignored this.  “And then, _just coincidentally_, Andrew’s coming out from England just before Willow leaves.  Odd how I wind up never being alone.”

            “You want to be alone at Christmas?”

            “Ohhy vey,” Willow murmured, hiding an amused smile.

            “You could have taken me to see Giles.”

            “No,” Buffy said, exasperated, “I couldn’t.  I told you.  There’s not room in their little flat, and the house isn’t even ready for the three of us.  Besides,” she added in a mutter, rearranging her black boots, “I doubt you’d have much fun.”

            “Speaking of Giles,” Willow said, but Dawn interrupted.

            “Well, what about Andrew?”

            “What about him?  He’s staying in Bath, not Oxford.”

            “Preserving Giles’s remaining sanity,” Willow put in.

            “—And if anything, you’ll be babysitting Andrew, not the other way around.”

            Dawn rolled her eyes.

            “You can teach him some Italian.”

            “Oh, yeah, that’ll be a blast.  While you get to have fun in Oxford.  Did you know they have a collection of Perrault that has this one story, that totally relates to the Persian chants I’ve been researching?  I could be doing _homework_ over vacation.”

            Buffy gave Dawn a dry smile.  “Nice try.”

            “Points for originality,” Willow said.

            “It’s going to be a working vacation for me,” Buffy said, “and for Giles and Elisabeth too.  She’s working on her thesis, and he’s working on his house.”

            “Uh, Buffy,” Willow said, as Dawn flipped her hair and stalked out the door of the bedroom, “I doubt it’s going to be all work.  You will have to _talk_ to him sometime.  And also?  There’s that little detail where you’ll be living at close quarters with them.”

            “So?” Buffy said, unhooking a sweater from its hanger and folding it carefully.  “I’ve stayed at close quarters with Giles before.”

            “Not like I have,” Willow said.  “And not with Elisabeth.”

            Buffy gave her an arch look.  “You think I don’t know Giles has sex?”

            Willow looked relieved that she didn’t have to bring it up herself.  “It’s not just sex,” she said.  “It’s _them_.”

            They seemed to have arrived at the point Willow had been wanting to make all day, but she seemed strangely loath to elaborate now that they had reached it.  Buffy pursed a not-smile, searching for a chink in her packing to stuff in her sweater.  Willow was on her own; Buffy had been too disconnected for too long from plotless conversations about the complexities of relationships.  _Hard, bright, violent_, she had said once to Spike about the world: that had settled into a simplicity of thought and action, and the ragged ends had been cauterized long ago.

            But for a moment Buffy was jerked back to another hard, bright, and violent place—the desert, accompanied only by her Watcher, on a quest for Slayerly enlightenment.  The experience had made her deeply uncomfortable, and not because she had spent it alone with an older man—Giles’s dignity and self-possession had been as arid as their surroundings—but because—

            “She’s not like his other girlfriends,” Willow said.  “She’s not…separate.”

            “Well, she wouldn’t be,” Buffy said absently, “considering what she knows.”

            It had taken Buffy a longer time than she liked to admit to get over her resentment at this fact.  Everyone had looked blank at her surprise when she finally tumbled to it that Elisabeth had known their whole story—Buffy’s death and resurrection, Willow, the First, all of it.  They had all realized, or been told, long before, even Andrew: and she could see even now the veiled accusing looks on their faces.  _It just goes to show, doesn’t it, how hard and blind Buffy is._  They might just as well have said it.

            “Also,” Dawn said around a cookie, “she was a virgin when she met him.”

            Buffy and Willow startled at her reappearance in the doorway, and for a moment only stared at her.

            “What?” Dawn said.  “I’m sure it has to be a factor.”

            “How did you know that?” Willow demanded, sitting up in a bounce on the bed.

            “I heard Giles talking about it with Mom.”

            Buffy had shifted her startled gaze to Willow, but now turned again to gape at her sister.  “He discussed it with _Mom_?” she uttered, involuntarily.

            Dawn shrugged and popped the rest of her cookie into her mouth.  “She found out somehow,” she said, wiping the crumbs off her hands on her jeans, “and teased him about it.”

            This was exactly it.  This was exactly the thing that bothered her.  Everybody’s life passed right by under her nose, exactly like this.

            Buffy said nothing more, but went back to her efforts to stuff her suitcase closed, pressing her lips tight close.  She couldn’t even complain that nobody told her anything, because inevitably she’d get the answer:  _And you never did ask_.

            Which wasn’t her fault.  What with all the world-saveage and the constant, precarious negotiation of cultural divides between humans and demons, how was she supposed to pay attention to every little thing?  She was her job.  Kendra had said that; Kendra, who had died because she had not been taught to be alive to her emotions and instincts, unlike Buffy, who…hadn’t felt anything for a long time.

            She was looking forward to having work under her hands.  Tools that weren’t for killing but building, a secret Xander knew and had tried to impart to her, abortively.  Not talk.  Talk was aimless, helpless.  Willow wanted her to talk _about_ Giles, wanted her to talk _to_ Giles.  But what was the point?

            Besides, Giles sucked at talking even worse than she did.

            With a sharp whipping sound Buffy drew the zipper round—side, front, side—and lifted the suitcase to set on the floor.  She looked up at Willow, who was giving her, predictably, that wry understanding look which Buffy had unconsciously been expecting.

            “Well,” Buffy said briskly, “I’m ready.”

            “That’s what you think,” Willow said.

 

*

 

The postman was just locking up the box-face as she, Willow, and Dawn clattered down the steps to the ground floor of their building.  Presented with the virtue of three feminine smiles and Dawn’s purring Italian, he unlocked the face again and handed Buffy their post—and they were out the door.

            They were nearly late for the flight, and it wasn’t until Buffy tumbled into her seat and had begun nesting that she found the small sheaf of mail crammed in her pocket.  Bill; bill; flyer; blank postcard from L.A. (her contact, keeping tabs on Angel—it was time to worry if she got no postcard); Christmas card.  She flipped it over, and saw the name on the flap:  Summers, with the return address in an unfamiliar hand.

            With a sense of disgruntled misgiving, Buffy opened the envelope and drew out the card: a Rockwellian drawing of Santa with a child on his knee.  As she opened it, a photo slid out into her lap.  Before looking at the photo, Buffy read the card.

            _Hey girls_, Hank’s writing said.  _Hope you’re enjoying your time in __Europe__.  You’ll have to come visit us in __Florida__ sometime.  Thought I’d enclose a picture of Denise and the boys, so you’d see what they look like.  Merry sunny Christmas!_

            It was signed in her father’s hand, followed by a curly scrawl: _Denise_.

            Her heart beating hard, Buffy lifted the photo to look closely.  A blond young woman was squatting in a sunny backyard in front of a brightly-colored swing set.  On one knee she supported a baby; at her other side a toddler swayed uncertainly, his fist gripping her shirt.  On the back, Denise’s writing said:  _Ashton, 18 mos.  Caleb, 6 mos_.

            Was this another thing she had failed to pay attention to?  Had she just breezed by the info that her father had spawned two sons with his erstwhile secretary?

            No, somebody would have said something.  Dawn would have let Buffy catch her crying; Willow would have provided some memorable snark; Giles….

            Giles would have turned away to hide a murderous look, letting her see just enough to know that he was on her side, not enough to remind her what surprisingly deep darkness he harbored.  Though she already knew; who did Giles think he was fooling?

            No, Hank had simply not bothered to consult his daughters about his new family, but blithely referred to them as if they already knew all about it.  He probably thought they _did_ know all about it, and were waiting on pins and needles to see Denise and the boys in living color.

            Had she not been on a plane, wedged in between a proud-nosed businessman in Armani and a young mother jollying a toddler, Buffy would have ripped card and photo in dime-sized pieces and pitched them out the nearest window.  As it was, she stuffed photo into card and card into envelope, crammed the whole thing into her handbag, and sat back to stare broodingly out the little porthole as the plane taxied down the runway.

 

*

 

Except for a very brief stop in London as they spread out over the globe, Buffy had not really been to England.  Unused to seeing English as the primary language on the signs, she felt almost doubly bewildered as she made her way off the plane and into the broader space of the gate.

            “There she is—”

            She turned, and there was Giles coming toward her, with Elisabeth at his elbow.

            At least she was still glad to see him.  Whatever horrific things happened afterwards, she was always glad to see him.  She went forward and into his awkward, tender hug.  His scent was the same, overlaid with the new tang of sawdust, book dust, and something that Buffy thought of as England, but was probably Elisabeth.

            She pulled away to find Elisabeth waiting with a small, strained smile.  She put out a firm hand and Buffy shook it; it was strong in the way that normal women’s hands were strong, and altogether she looked much healthier than when Buffy had seen her last.  “Do you have luggage coming?” she asked, with a woman’s grasp of the essentials.

            Buffy nodded.

            “The carousel, I believe, is that way.”  Giles’s voice and demeanor were cool and arid: it was impossible to tell whether he was masking a soft emotion or setting up to be difficult, and Buffy had a sinking feeling that it was the latter.  Though there was no reason it couldn’t be both, she reminded herself—not that that would make him any easier to deal with.

            It was, however, not difficult to let Giles and Elisabeth take over the agency of travelling.  They paused at the restrooms; retrieved Buffy’s large suitcase without much difficulty (Elisabeth took over Buffy’s carryon so that she could pull the heavy suitcase); worked their way through milling British accents to the terminal door and out to Giles’s car.

            Buffy’s suspicions about Giles’s state of mind were confirmed when they reached the road.  A silence had settled over the three of them, and Buffy, in the back seat, wanted to pop it free, like a chiropractor adjusting a spine.  Elisabeth, perhaps out of a similar desire, reached to the console and hit play on a CD.

            “Could you turn that off, please,” Giles said.

            “I thought you liked Sixpence,” Elisabeth said, mildly; then, in answer to his silence:  “Well, it’s either this or the Awkward Silence of Death.”

            “I prefer the Awkward Silence of Death while I’m trying to drive,” Giles said.

            Elisabeth made a noncommittal face and turned off the music, then twisted to look back at Buffy in the back seat.  “So, how’s Rome?”

            “Surprisingly demony,” Buffy said.  “How’s Oxford?”

            “Surprisingly haunted.”

            “Yeah,” Buffy said, “I heard about how you took out the spirit of your great-great-whatever grandfather.  Nice.”

            “It had its charms.  What’s a universe without paternal angst?”

            “Yeah, really,” Buffy said, half to herself.

 

*

 

Elisabeth was desperate for some sign that this wasn’t a dreadful mistake.  But despite Buffy’s friendly coolness and her own forced nonchalance, Rupert’s mood permeated the journey back to Oxford like a London particular, and it showed no signs of clearing, not even when they stopped to pick up a pizza as Elisabeth had suggested.

            But the real trouble didn’t start until after dinner.

            It took some doing to clear the table of Elisabeth’s research materials and laptop for dinner, and the addition of Buffy’s luggage to the small bedroom (“Well, you see,” Elisabeth said in answer to Buffy’s protests that she should have the couch rather than the bed, “Rupert will be spending the night out at the house, and I’ll be up at odd hours working, so it’s a matter of convenience.”) made the flat seem even more cramped than usual.  While Elisabeth and Buffy set the table for dinner and tossed the salad, Rupert put fresh sheets on the bed and packed himself a satchel to take to Pyke’s Lea (Buffy had opined that she would prefer to shower and go straight to bed that evening, as she had missed sleep several nights running).

            Dinner was a stilted affair, with Elisabeth heroically attempting to make small talk. Buffy also made an effort, but she seemed increasingly subdued; her usual brisk manner was entirely absent, and she held her lips thin in a way that could be interpreted as either sullenness or sadness; Elisabeth didn’t know which.

            Whatever it was, it seemed to be undoing Rupert’s native civility: once, Elisabeth had caught him sneaking a soft glance up from his plate at his erstwhile Slayer; when Buffy took no notice of it, he withdrew into himself again and became more magisterially silent than ever.  When Buffy asked for the pepper he reached across and placed it before her, without words and without risking touch.  Elisabeth stifled an aggravated sigh.

            At length Buffy pushed her plate aside.  “That was good; thank you,” she said.

            “There’s ice cream for dessert in the freezer,” Elisabeth said.  “I don’t know whether you like fudge ripple.”

            “No thanks,” Buffy said, with a rueful smile at her.  “I think I’ll take my shower now.”

            Buffy got up.  Rupert pushed his chair back and reached for the salad bowl.

            “I can do the washing up,” Elisabeth said, “if you’d rather not.”  She winced at the faint appeasing tone in her own voice.

            “No, that’s all right,” Rupert said.  “Though I don’t see why we bother; this place is a tip.”

            Elisabeth did not look round to see if Buffy had heard.  She sat, hot and cold to the fingertips, for a few stunned seconds; then she got up and collected their plates, being especially careful not to clatter them in her anger.

            She was not going to say anything; she was _not_ going to say anything: but as she put the plates in the sink after scraping them, she threw caution to the winds and said it.

            “I’d appreciate it,” she told him in a low voice, “if you didn’t include me in your ritual self-torture.”

            “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rupert sniffed.

            “‘This place is a tip’?  ‘This place’ happens to be my home—the only one I’ve got, in case you’ve forgotten.  So if you don’t mind—”

            “Oh, for God’s sake, Elisabeth,” he hissed, as the bathroom door closed down the hall, “I wasn’t trying to insult you.”

            “No,” she retorted in a whisper, “just indulging a first-strike mentality, and I don’t want to be caught in—”

            Rupert tossed his head.  “Well, look who’s calling the kettle black.”

            “_Fuck_ you, Rupert.”  Elisabeth turned away from him, breathing hard.

            There was a long silence; they heard the shower start.  Elisabeth reached up to pinch the bridge of her nose, and forced herself to draw slower breaths.  Finally she turned around to look at him.  For a moment he met her gaze, defiant; then he dropped his eyes and reached to fiddle with the cheese-caked spatula on the counter.

            “I should go,” he said.

            Elisabeth forced an even tone.  “I think you probably should.  Do you want some tea for the road?”

            He made an irritated face, then smoothed out his expression with a visible effort.  “No; thank you.  You all right clearing this up yourself?”

            “It’s no problem,” she said.

            After a hesitation he went past her out of the kitchen; trembling, she followed him to the front room, where his satchel waited.  Silently she watched him shrug into his leather jacket, lift his keys from their shelf, and shoulder the strap of his bag.  He opened the door and paused to look at her, standing in the dim foyer hugging herself, her eyes mercifully shadowed.

            “I am,” he said softly, shuffling backward over the threshold, “—I _am_ trying to behave properly, you know.”  He let out a deep sigh.  “I know it’s not nearly good enough…but—”

            She wished she could cut him off: his clumsy apology was bringing the tears hot and strong to her eyes, and she was desperate not to cry.

            “Well, goodnight,” he finished lamely.

            “Goodnight, Rupert,” she said, her voice constricted but gentle.  She was beginning to repent having sworn at him.  “Get some rest,” she added, more pointedly.

            His shoulders hunched only a little.  “I will.  I’ll call you tomorrow.”

            She nodded, and closed the door quietly between them.

 

*

 

Buffy toweled her hair in front of the mirror, then twisted it into a wet knot and pinned it into place, studying her own expression in the glass.  Willow had been right, of course.  She had not been prepared for the sheer presence of Giles and Elisabeth in the flesh; for the books piled in odd places and feminine bath products in the bathroom, for Giles’s familiar crockery mixed with Elisabeth’s own kitchen utensils, for the scent and detail of the flat itself.

            And the evening had taught her something that numerous phone conversations could not: the amount of effort Elisabeth was putting into buffering Giles’s disintegrating self-possession.  She had a feeling that Elisabeth was not fully aware of what she was doing, because as the incident with the music proved, she understood the necessity of standing back and letting him make an ass of himself if that’s what he really wanted.  Giles being an ass bothered Buffy much less than it bothered Elisabeth; but she didn’t know if she could say that after living with him for six months.

            What was unnerving to her was not Giles employing his trademark passive-aggressive austerity; that was annoying but normal.  What was unnerving to Buffy was the clear strong undertow of emotion underneath it.  She had spent a whole year getting used to his dark outlook and flat affect, and had prepared herself to meet cold anger gloved in calculating, sarcastic intellect.  But what she read in the very lines of his movements was not calculation but chaos.

            She had come ready for an antagonist, and had found something far more distressing.

            Buffy slipped into her pajamas, and for good measure shrugged into the robe and slippers Elisabeth had offered her; this was another thing she had not adequately prepared her mind for, that England was _cold_.

            Giles was nowhere to be seen when she emerged from the bathroom.  In the kitchen she found Elisabeth scrubbing determinedly at dried cheese on a plate.

            “Giles gone?” she inquired mildly.

            “Yes.”  Elisabeth did not lift her head, and her tone was brief.

            Buffy sighed to herself.  “Want help with that?” she asked finally, shifting awkwardly toward the counter.

            At this Elisabeth did lift her head.  “Oh, no,” she said, blowing a tendril of hair out of her eyes, “this is easy to do.  And you’re my guest.”

            Buffy was about to observe that the point of her coming had not been to be treated as a guest, but Elisabeth beat her to it.  “Well,” she amended, “for tonight anyway.  I reckon you’ll get into the rhythm of things here soon enough.”  She bent again to scrubbing, and the tendril of hair drifted into her face once more.

            Elisabeth had either been crying or had staved off tears by the skin of her teeth: Buffy could read all the signs.  Feeling more and more uncomfortable, she sidled toward the kitchen door.  “I think I’ll go to bed now,” she said.  “If you don’t need me for anything….”

            Elisabeth lifted her head once more and met Buffy’s eyes directly.  “Thank you,” she said.  The corner of her mouth quirked wryly.  “It’s all right.  Goodnight.”  The tired humor of her voice and expression released Buffy, and with a faint relief she went back to the bedroom.

            Thanks to Dawn and Willow, Buffy had to forcibly banish the thought of Giles having sex in the bed she was about to sleep in.  She made a mental note to watch her opportunity to embarrass them back.  Elisabeth had thoughtfully laid an extra afghan over the coverlet; Buffy shrugged out of Elisabeth’s robe and quickly spread the afghan over the top before piling in.  She left the door slightly open in case Elisabeth wanted her robe back during the night, burrowed under the covers, and switched off the light.

            It was a comfortable bed, at least, and took on her warmth quickly. The sheets, though fresh, smelled of Giles—a scent that evoked a troubled safety.  Enough to sleep in, anyway.

            Buffy drifted off to the sound of Elisabeth’s laptop keyboard issuing, with a faint stream of light, through the chink of the unclosed door.

 

*

 

Buffy lay curled, warm in a womb of sleep, held close in by a resistance like water: a state so different from her chronic restlessness that it nearly woke her by itself.  But a sound was disturbing the stillness, a sound of distress that plucked at her instincts—a prophetic dream?  She hadn’t had one in ages; the weight of apocalyptic sorrow had been eased since the Choosing.

            No, it was something else; something nearby.  Buffy woke, in a single quiet second.  The distressed sound came again; quickly, she swung her feet to the floor and padded to the door.

            As her eyes adjusted from darkness to light, she understood what was happening, and moved swiftly to the couch where Elisabeth was sleeping.

            A single lamp shone over her head; she was twitching helplessly and emitting stifled cries.  Without stopping to think, Buffy began to unwrap the tangled quilt from round Elisabeth’s arms, with a gentle, soothing motion.  But as soon as she touched her, Elisabeth cried, “No!”

            “Shh,” Buffy said, “you’re—”

            “No—Rupert—please—don’t do this—”

            For a moment, Buffy was shocked into stillness; then she began to work more firmly to get Elisabeth free of the quilt.

            “Can’t tell you, I can’t tell you.  Don’t believe her, I can’t tell you—”  Elisabeth arched her head back, as if trying to squirm away from a restraining grasp, and her words came in an urgent mumble.  “Don’t…the darkness.  Darkness will take me…you can’t…should have killed me…you should have….”

            “Elisabeth,” Buffy said firmly, though her voice held a tremor.  “You’re only dreaming.  It’s time to wake up.”

            “Oh, no—”  Her voice petered out on a high moan, and she struggled in Buffy’s hands, and woke with a sob.

            “You were dreaming,” Buffy repeated lamely.

            Elisabeth rolled to the edge of the couch and choked; Buffy subsided to sit gingerly at her side.  After a few moments swallowing back heaves with her fist to her mouth, she drew a long, shuddering breath and muttered: “Thanks.”

            Buffy was ready with the glass of water Elisabeth had left on the coffee table.  Elisabeth took it, fumbling, swallowed two small sips, and held the glass to her forehead: motions that had the air of ritual about them.

            She confirmed Buffy’s speculations by saying at length, “Sorry.  Damn dream.  It could go away any time now.”

            “Is that what happened?” Buffy couldn’t stop herself from asking it.

            Elisabeth took away the glass to stare at her.  “Is what what happened?”

            “You were talking in your sleep—”

            “Oh, no—no, I _never_ talk in my sleep.”  Elisabeth gave her head many small shakes, as if she could undo it by denying it.

            “You were talking to Giles.  You were…pleading.”  The last word fell from Buffy’s lips like a book slapping to the floor: and Elisabeth flinched and looked away.

            “Oh God,” she murmured.  “Oh, that won’t do.  Oh, that won’t do at all.”

            Buffy asked tentatively:  “Doesn’t…doesn’t Giles know?”

            The look Elisabeth turned back to her was all the answer Buffy needed.

            Elisabeth turned her gaze to the water glass and said with a sigh:  “He knows I’m having nightmares.  But he thinks they’re only about the First.”

            Buffy frowned.  “Did the First attack you?”  It was news to her, though perhaps it was another of those things she ought to have known, or remembered.

            She looked up to see Elisabeth staring at her again.  “You don’t know….”

            Buffy rolled her eyes.  “I’ve been…really out of the loop.”

            “I guess so,” Elisabeth said blankly.  Buffy looked up defensively, but the other woman’s expression was flush with embarrassment, not accusation.  “What you must think of me…,” she said.

            “No, I—it’s been happening a lot lately.  I’m finding out all kinds of things that everybody else knew already.”  The memory of Hank’s Christmas card turned her tone bitter.  “I’m wondering where the hell I was.  I thought I was pretty caught up on things, but this trip….” She shook her head.  “I should have figured out that Giles was losing it when he freaked out during that fight we had about his old Council buddy.  And now I find out that the First got him to attack you.”  Elisabeth flinched again, but Buffy went on.  “I have—I have no idea where he is, mentally.  It’s like—I asked him if he had gone back to the Council, and he just…Do you think he has?” she asked Elisabeth suddenly, turning in her seat.

            But Elisabeth shook her head definitely.  “He wouldn’t.  And I wouldn’t let him—not after what they did to him and me.”

            Buffy blinked.  “…What they did to you and him?”

            The surprise had gone out of Elisabeth’s face; she was staring at Buffy with a look as shrewd as any Giles could give.

            “I think,” she said grimly, “I’d better get you caught up.”

 

*

 

They resettled themselves on the couch, Buffy with Elisabeth’s quilt around her shoulders and a bowl of fudge ripple ice cream, Elisabeth in her robe with a steaming cup of tea, and Elisabeth began.

            “When I left Sunnydale,” she said, eyes on the curls of steam rising from the mug she held in her lap, “the plan was that I’d take what I needed to get started in a new dimension, and drop contact once it was possible.  Willow helped with some computer hacking to forge me enough academic history to get started at Oxford, and I’d got a job in London working as a bookscout for a particular antiquarian who was getting too old to jaunt across country to make appraisals and purchases.  I came here with a deeply embarrassing amount of Rupert’s money and my own earnings to get lodgings and start over, academically and—otherwise.  When Rupert came to London to ask the Council for information about Glory, he met me, and we…well, we made it a little more difficult for each of us to go our separate ways.”  She gave Buffy a sidelong wry look, which Buffy returned. 

            The cat (who had regarded Buffy with caution when she arrived, but reassuringly warmed to her presence during the evening) appeared silently, leapt up on the couch, and settled in the space between them on the middle cushion.  He curled his tail around his feet and blinked magisterially at Buffy, who reached briefly to stroke his whiskers as Elisabeth went on.

            “I sent him my address in College when I came up to Oxford, but I didn’t hear from him again until after…after the battle was over.  He showed up on my doorstep in the last stages of exhaustion, dehydrated and spent from dragging himself over the Atlantic to report to the Council on—on your death.  He collapsed, pretty much, and I let him crash here, nursed him back on his feet, and finally let him go home when it looked like he could stand it.  But we stopped pretending we’d never talk again.  We—I think the idea was, we were supposed to be friends.”

            “Friends with benefits?” Buffy said, lightly so as not to betray any misgivings.

            “Past benefits.  Present benefits, no.”  Buffy had never noticed how like Giles’s her dry tone was; despite the difference in age and diction, they were much of a kind in humor.  “Not at that time,” Elisabeth went on.  “In fact, Rupert did his best to keep me at arm’s length then—understandable, considering that I had all this illicit knowledge of what he was going through.  But he didn’t really get mad at me until he found out you’d been brought back.”

            Buffy stirred the melted remains of her ice cream and spooned up some of the fudge, thinking.  From all she’d seen, nobody else had ever questioned Elisabeth’s right to her knowledge, least of all Giles—but it was becoming clearer that the only person whom it _hadn’t_ troubled was Andrew.

            “We had a lunch date, just me and him that time—the only time I tried to have a lunch date with him and Brian it went spectacularly badly.  They disliked one another on sight—and Rupert asked me afterward if I was sleeping with him, and I told him it was none of his business—though it would have been easy enough to tell him I wasn’t, and wasn’t going to be….Where was I?”

            Buffy thought.  “Giles found out I was back?”

            Elisabeth cut short a sip of tea.  “Oh, yeah.  Right.  He didn’t even call to cancel the lunch date, which didn’t surprise me, because I—well, he’d called to say he was back in England for good, and I was pretty sure I knew how that was going to turn out, and—  Well, I got a call from him when he landed at LAX at some ungodly hour here, and he demanded coldly—without identifying himself—to know what to expect when he arrived in Sunnydale.  I told him he’d find out better than I could tell him—and he hung up.

            “I didn’t hear from him after that, not till he came back here.”  Elisabeth settled more comfortably against the back of the couch and put her feet up on the coffee table.  “He came back here and picked a fight with every one of his friends; Olivia called to warn me, so I was all prepared not to give him any satisfaction when he called up to say he had some business in Oxford and wanted to see me.  But then I found out by accident that his ‘business’ was to sell his books—and then he got the fight he wanted, all right.”

            “Wait a minute.”  Buffy put the ice-cream bowl down on the coffee table and frowned at Elisabeth.  “What do you mean, ‘sell his books’?  You mean, like, extra copies?”

            “Nope,” Elisabeth said.  She took one hand away from her tea mug to gesture expansively at the huddle of crates in the loft alcove, bursting with familiar-looking tomes.  “Over the course of several months, Rupert wholesaled the heart out of his occult collection, refused to answer the Council’s calls and letters, and as far as I knew, did every possible mundane thing he could to forget what he’d left behind—speculating in real estate and raking in money from this investment and that….  It was a game—we all knew that, he most of all—but it was a painful game nonetheless.”

            Elisabeth paused to take a sip of her tea, which had lost its steaming heat.  “I remember one day in particular when I opened a box and found—but I didn’t tell you that part.  I went round after him and bought up as many of the books he sold as I could.  I used up every last shred of my credit as a bookscout and a large chunk of my meager savings to do it.  Which was how the Council noticed me.  Well, that and Robson tracked Rupert to my flat when he came to collapse at the end of the term before.  Rupert selling his occult books, his ‘friend’ buying them, a very patchy paper trail and a visa suspiciously easily obtained…well.”

            Buffy sat stunned.  “But Giles _loves_ his books.”  It had never occurred to her that Giles might have wanted to leave her in order to conceal a crack-up of his own.  And Elisabeth’s non-critical acceptance of her ignorance drove the wedge of shame in further.

            “I think that’s why he did it,” Elisabeth said.  “Having anything he loved about him was too painful.  It was pretty obvious, but it wasn’t much comfort at the time.  Like I said, one day I unpacked a box of books I’d bought by catalogue and there….”  She stopped and gazed into her tea for a moment.  “There was the book he’d used to save my life.”  She stopped again and looked away, as if to weigh the emotions measure by measure in her next words.  “I couldn’t expect him to remember that, about that book.  For all I know he’s saved a dozen lives with it, besides mine.  But it was a blow all the same.  Well, Rupert gave up the game after a while, and repented of selling his books, but when he tried to buy them back he found out that someone had bought up most of them.  He traced them back to me, and called me confidently expecting that I’d bought them to keep for him—what good luck!  Well, I _had_ bought them for him, but I didn’t like his taking it for granted, and I’d just come off of opening that box, so I told him the books were mine and I wasn’t selling.”

            Buffy tried to turn a laugh into a cough, but Elisabeth noticed and started to laugh along with her.

            “Yes,” she said, “it was kinda petty.  But I felt he deserved it.”

            “Good for you,” Buffy said boldly. 

            Elisabeth snorted.  “Yeah.  Well, what happened was I wound up with a huge albatross of an occult collection round my neck—and I’d had to throw a pretty wide loop to be sure of getting as many of Rupert’s books as I could.  Anyway, Rupert had a deeper change of heart—I suspect it had something to do with his ignoring the invitation to Xander and Anya’s wedding till it was too late for him to go—and he called me again, in a much more penitent mood.  I agreed to meet him to talk.  But the Council got to me first.”

            Buffy stifled a growl of apprehension.  Her feeling about the Council had grown much more visceral than she liked to admit—certainly, to admit to Giles.  Elisabeth, however, seemed to understand.

            “One of their teams snatched me off the street one day and chloroformed me.  I woke up in a white-paneled cell wearing nothing but a robe like a baptismal gown.”  Elisabeth’s voice hardened.  “I didn’t know where I was, and it was one of the scariest moments of my life—scarier than dying was, certainly.  Some men came for me and without a word they hauled me out and up before a panel of men on a dais.  They began questioning me about my history, my purchase of questionable books, my connection to Rupert.  I was shaking on my bare feet at first; but then…I don’t know, I guess I just got too pissed to be afraid.  I wish I could get that back….Well, I smarted off to them and told them exactly what I thought of Watchers, of the Council, and of them, whoever they were in the scheme of things.  It didn’t have much effect.  They told me that if I didn’t cooperate, they’d hurt Rupert.  I almost believed this for a minute.  But then it just came clear all at once. ‘You’re not using Rupert to get to me,’ I said, ‘you’re using me to get to Rupert.  Rupert’s around here somewhere, isn’t he?  You’ve got him watching and if he doesn’t dance to your tune, you’re gonna hurt me.’  The head guy on the dais—he’d have been handsome in other circumstances—didn’t deny it.  He said, ‘Well, you’re fairly expendable, either way.’  And to prove it, he motioned this big lug over to point a gun at my eye.”

            Elisabeth paused to clear her roughening voice and take a sip of tea, and Buffy gritted her teeth.  _What’s a universe without paternal angst?_ echoed in her mind.

            “I said, with the gun pointed in my face, ‘You can’t make Rupert do what you want by hurting me.  Piss him off, maybe.’  ‘I think we can bear the wrath of Rupert Giles,’ the guy said, in a very withering voice.  I said, ‘No, I don’t think you can.  It won’t work in any case.  Rupert knows my life belongs to me to lose or keep, and he’ll let me choose, just as I’d let him choose.’  I didn’t _know_ that, but I wanted him to hear it, if he was there, so he would understand he was free on my account to refuse them.”

            “But what did they want from him?” Buffy asked, impatient.

            “Oh, you know.  The usual.  They wanted him to go back to Sunnydale and give them a foothold in your life again.  Hah,” Elisabeth said.  “Like they knew the half of it.”

            “You know, if Giles had told me this,” Buffy said, her voice taut, “it’d have saved us a couple of fights.”

            Elisabeth gave her one sympathetic glance, and returned to her tale.  “Well, anyway, I…I’m not sure how to explain this, but I had one of those moments of utter clarity.  I knew for certain Rupert was in that building, and I knew for certain that he was trusting me—and I was trusting him—” she stopped a moment and swallowed hard, then forced her way on— “and I knew that it wasn’t—he wasn’t my friend, though he was my equal.  I knew I loved him then, and I was so thankful I’d been able to lie about that ten minutes before.  And I wasn’t afraid anymore—I wasn’t even that angry.  Because they were just so clueless.”

            Buffy remembered a time when she and Giles had known a similar tacit trust, and, reading the resigned grief on Elisabeth’s face, was startled to realize how long she too had been mourning it.  For the first time it occurred to her, explicitly, that she and Elisabeth might have more in common than merely being women who cared about Giles:  not everyone, she knew, valued that weightless balance of trust and autonomy so highly in matters of love.

            “Well, long story short,” Elisabeth was saying, “they let me go.  Gave me my clothes back, blindfolded me, took me back to Oxford and turned me out on the street.  But before that, the head guy on the interrogation team took me into his office and offered me a job as a Watcher.”  Elisabeth turned to Buffy with a deadpan look.  “If you can believe it.”

            Buffy shook her head, in a disbelieving snort of laughter.

            “I holed up in my flat for a couple of days, getting over the shock of it all.  I have to admit, it had a negative effect on my weak nerves.  I’m not a very strong person, you know.  Rupert came over a few days after that, and I pointed my new crossbow at him and tried to make him believe I wanted no part of him.  I couldn’t keep up that pose for ten seconds, even.  He came in, and gently took the crossbow away, and made me some tea in my own kitchen.  We talked for a long time, or maybe a short time, I’m not sure.  But I remember how it ended.  I told him I needed him to go away, and I couldn’t look at him when I told him—I told him I had feelings for him, and I wasn’t going to be able to keep my end of our silent bargain, so I needed him to go away.  I could see him make a little movement, but all he said was, ‘Are you sure you want me to go?  That’s what you want?’”  Elisabeth’s eyes were fixed in a faraway gaze on the bookshelf-crates.  “I said, ‘Yes.’  So he went away.”  She sighed quietly.  “Then I didn’t hear from him for a while.  When he came back, he was all over fading bruises and looked like he hadn’t slept for years, and he came in, and he kissed me, and that was that.”

            Elisabeth’s matter-of-fact tone was belied by her gaze, bright on the books.  Buffy’s throat suddenly ached, from a number of pains that all came uppermost at once—the thought of Giles in love outside their interest or notice, the sympathetic weight of  love’s consummation (and how long had it been since she had known _that_?), the losing of him, as if in a recurring dream of his leaving her again and again, in different times and different places, for different reasons.  With an deep breath and an effort Buffy pulled herself together, in concert with Elisabeth, who was drawing breath to speak again.

            “I’m not very proud of what I did after that.  I gave in to Rupert, who wanted me to come and visit him and Willow at his house.  I went there and loved him and—” she paused again— “loved him.  And then I told him to his face I wouldn’t fight with him in the next apocalypse, and I left him there.  I tried to convince him we’d do our best work separately.  He didn’t accept it easily, and he was very hurt.  But he took me to the station and let me go.”

            “And the First used that against you both,” Buffy said, in a let-me-guess tone that made Elisabeth snort a mirthless laugh.

            “The First had a number of weapons in its arsenal,” she said in a hard voice Buffy had never heard her use, “not the least of which was the fact that I’d died in the portal to this dimension.”

            “Oh God,” Buffy breathed, suddenly understanding.

            Elisabeth was silent for a long moment.  Then:  “I thought it was hallucinations at first.  Then I knew it wasn’t.  Then I was never alone.  I had my own personal mirror, 24/7.  I learned to hate my voice, my looks, my walk.”

            “I know the feeling,” Buffy said, her own voice matching the hardness of Elisabeth’s.

            “I know you do,” Elisabeth said quietly.  “God only knows what it did to Rupert.  He has a lot of dead people in his life.”  Elisabeth broke into a sudden, brittle laugh.  “A lot of dead people in his life.  That sounds funny, now I think about it.”  She took a long drink of tea and recovered enough to go on.  “I don’t need to tell you what happened, really.  You already know.  The First worked Rupert like a pump handle, isolated him, showed him God knows what horrors, and finally convinced him, I presume using my face, that I was not—not what I’d made myself out to be.  Or that I was withholding my knowledge so that you would all fall flat on your faces in the battle.  Or that I was evil at the bottom of me….”  Elisabeth’s voice trailed off, and she lowered her chin, her mouth very small.  “Whatever it was, it made him come to my flat one night, hopped up on Dutch courage and ready to torture my information out of me.  He got pretty far with it before he broke.”  She lifted her chin and her next words were brisk.  “He left when the attempt failed, and then _I_ broke.  I had to take a medical leave and stay with friends.  When I was well enough, I took off and went to hole up in Rupert’s flat in Bath until the apocalypse was over and he came home.  I saw that he had his shower and got to bed, and left him a note saying that when he was ready, we could talk.  I came back here and put my life back together.  Rupert came and we talked, and reconciled, and he found the house, and we are as you see us.  That’s all she wrote.”

            Elisabeth’s voice was gruff and blasted from talking; she lifted the mug and drained the rest of the tea, then said, “Call of nature.  I’ll be right back.”  The cat jumped down to follow her.

            While she was gone, Buffy sat staring at the bookcases, with a feeling as of shell-shock.  They had just been “Giles’s books in Elisabeth’s apartment” when she arrived: now they represented a depth of history, a resonance of love and fear and deep anger.  She had known for a long time that there were layers to peel in Giles’s past: what she hadn’t known about were the layers to peel in Giles’s present.

            _But how could I know these things if he doesn’t tell me?_ she asked herself, huddling in her quilt.  _I’m getting it from all sides.  If it’s not Dad assuming I know all about his two sons, it’s Giles assuming I know all about his torture by the First.  What the fuck was I supposed to have done different?_

            Elisabeth returned to the livingroom and took up her tea mug and Buffy’s ice-cream dish.  Wrapping herself in the quilt as in a cloak, Buffy got up and followed her into the kitchen.  But she couldn’t think of anything to say.  Instead, she merely watched Elisabeth wash their dishes and put them in the drainer.  At last Elisabeth dried her hands, straightened the slight disarray on the counter left over from tea-making, and turned to Buffy with the same matter-of-fact expression that had released her to go to bed hours earlier.

            “Thanks,” Buffy pushed out, “for telling me all of that.”

            “You’re welcome,” Elisabeth said. 

            “And…,” —this was an experiment— “I’m sorry I was so bitchy to you, you know, at the time.”

            Elisabeth winced.  “The only thing that bugged me about that was that I walked right into the First’s divide-and-conquer trap.  I didn’t blame you.  But—” and a mischievous smile twitched at her lips— “just for future reference: the Brits call an emergency room a casualty ward.  Infinitely more apt, for our purposes, I think.”

            The mischievous smile, as she turned it to Buffy, was softened by a touch of self-deprecation. 

            Buffy smiled back.

 

*

 

Morning came early in the Bowen/Giles household.  Buffy woke to a clattering in the kitchen and the sound of Elisabeth’s voice.  There was no other voice; she must be on the phone.  Buffy turned over and regarded the dark blades of the ceiling fan with a blank calm.  Finally she decided to get up without being called.

            When she arrived in the kitchen ten minutes later, groomed and dressed, she found Elisabeth pacing back and forth with the cordless phone pinned to her cheek with one shoulder while dropping bread into the toaster with the other hand.

            “Yeah…no, probably not in the afternoon, I’ve got some errands to run.  Christmas presents to buy, you know…none of your business, nosey!...well, yeah, I emailed the edited review of literature to Biggs, but God knows if that’s the end of the story…Okay, I’ll see you later, then.  Bye.”  Her voice sounded too relaxed for her to be talking to Giles:  Buffy decided that it must be her friend Brian on the other end.  “There’s coffee if you want it,” she said to Buffy, thumbing the phone off and plucking the toast out of the toaster to a waiting plate.  “If you don’t mind, I propose to drag you off with me to College this morning.  I need to pick up some papers, and tie up some loose ends.  Then I thought we’d grab some lunch and do some Christmas shopping.”

            “Sounds good to me,” Buffy said, pouring coffee into a mug Elisabeth had left on the counter for her.

            Elisabeth wandered off with her toast and coffee, and a few minutes later Buffy heard the shower start.

 

*

 

Half an hour later they were walking briskly down a road Elisabeth identified as the Iffley Road, toward Magdalen Bridge and the Tower.  Elisabeth was dressed in a long black skirt and boots, a sweater and pea jacket, and a black beret mashed awkwardly over her pinned-up hair.  She looked calm and more or less pleased with life, and hummed a few bars of “Hey Jude,” which she had had playing on the stereo while she dressed.  Buffy decided that, however unpleasant they were to experience, the dreams must be serving as a release valve for the pressures that lay upon her.  She wondered what would happen if Elisabeth told Giles about the dreams—or if they merely stopped.  Would their cautious balance be toppled?

            “…na na na na,” Elisabeth hummed, slapping at the flap of her leather satchel, which she wore across her far shoulder.  “Oh, by the way, Rupert called this morning.  He’s going to do some work on the house alone today, then he’s going to pick us up for dinner about six and show you the house afterward.”

            “Okay,” Buffy said, and added cautiously, “How did he sound?”

            “Groggy,” Elisabeth said.  “Which means he slept in.  All the better for him.”

            Buffy had her own ideas about what that meant, and suspected Elisabeth did too, but she said nothing.  She thought suddenly:  _She’s trying very hard not to need him to be different_.  Elisabeth, she realized, had a stubborn independence that went deeper than mere choice of action, and knew as intimately as Buffy did herself the difficulty of keeping one’s autonomy and not imposing on others without going all hard and brittle.  _Not a very strong person_, she had said—and Buffy knew too the subtle temptation to claim that as a badge of honor, of proof that one was not a woman of stone.

            It was proving more disturbing to like Elisabeth than to dislike her.

            The walk to Magdalen College turned out to be shorter than she’d anticipated.  There was a disarming compactness to Oxford that Buffy would never have guessed she might like if she hadn’t lived in Rome first.  The climate, however, was a little less than disarming.  Buffy shivered in her fleece jacket as a rogue breeze keened up and tickled her spine, and glanced up at the pearling grey sky.  “Is it going to rain?”

            “Hmm?”  Elisabeth glanced up in the same direction Buffy was looking, and down again in time to neatly dodge a bicyclist coming their way.  “Not for a while yet, I reckon.  I’ve got the ol’ bumbershoot tucked in my bag.  It’s like the American Express card—never leave home without it.  This is the bridge.  Off that way is Addison’s Walk; up ahead is my college.  We’ll just nip up to my cubby and get some of the papers I’ll need.  Good morning, Mr Sims.”

            Buffy smiled at the porter in Elisabeth’s wake, and followed her along a corridor and up a flight of stairs.

            “So—what is your thesis about, exactly?”

            Elisabeth chuckled.  “Seriously?  It’s about the metanarratives of fairytale, specifically focusing on the 19th century.”

            Her mischievous glance met Buffy’s eye over her shoulder.  Buffy broke into a grin.  “More power to you,” she said.

            “Thanks.  Ah, here we are.  This’ll be just a moment, then we’ll cross the quad and visit Dr. Biggs.”  Elisabeth fell to humming “Hey Jude” again as she dug through a pile of files.  Buffy drifted over to the window and looked out on the cool stones and bare trees of the university.  Giles had gone here, she thought suddenly.  He had hated it, he said, and dropped out.  But he must have come back, Buffy thought pensively, in order to continue with his Watcher’s career.  She knew something about coming back in shame to start over in the same place, but not like this; it was so much easier just to _go on_.  She wondered if Giles coming back here again had as much to do with Oxford as Elisabeth.

            There was a hollow, flat knock on the doorframe behind.  Buffy turned around to see a man about Elisabeth’s age—an age she was increasingly starting to think of as young_ish_—tall and lanky, with tousled sandy hair and a languid English face.

            “Hallo, face,” Elisabeth said, pushing up her glasses on her nose.

            “Cheerio, ugly,” he returned.  “I come bearing news.  Biggs has flown the coop.  He has gone to Town, my own, my lovely, he has gone to Town.  You won’t have to wrangle with him today about old Knoepflmacher.”

            “Couldn’t resist a trip to the BM for those Romantic botanists, eh?  I wondered if he’d crack under the strain when Selim showed up with those references.”

            “Got it in one.  So what about lunch?”

            “What, already?  Is the Mohel even _serving_ it yet?”  Elisabeth put down a book to dig out her cell phone and flip it open for the time.

            “We could just dawdle comfortably down to St. Andrew’s to work up an appetite,” he suggested, with a furtive glance in Buffy’s direction.

            Elisabeth looked up from under her brows.  “Carnagey’s not gonna come down on that Gibbon, Brian.  Give it up.”

            “Well, I’m sure, with the charms of a lovely bookscout in the mix—”

            “You’re lucky he’s not charging you extra interest for that display case.”

            “How many times to I have to apologize for that bloody display case?”

            “He’s never asked you to apologize, that I recall,” Elisabeth said mildly.

            “Sly wench:  I meant you.”

            Elisabeth smiled; Buffy deduced that whatever had happened to the display case, it was fast becoming the kind of history they could make uncomfortable jokes about.

            Elisabeth turned to her.  “Feel like a tour of the sights?”

            “Sure,” Buffy said.  “If you don’t—”

            “Who’s your friend?”  Brian had found his opportunity to ask for an introduction.  He was looking at her with civilized admiration; Buffy was privately amused.

            “Oh, of course.  How stupid of me.  Buffy, this is Brian Whitaker.  Brian, Buffy Summers.”

            Understanding broke over the man’s face.  “Oh, right!  I’d forgotten you were coming to stay.  Pleased to meet you.”  He stretched out an eager hand to shake hers.  “I’ve never met a Slayer before.”  Buffy blinked, then remembered that Brian had cared for Elisabeth during the last apocalypse; of course he was in the know, now.

            “Probably won’t be the last time,” Buffy assured him dryly.  “Nice to meet you.”

            “Well, let’s take a stroll up St. Aldates and let Buffy get the lay of the land, then come back round for lunch at the Mohel.  And maybe,” she grinned, “we can spare the time to hector Carnagey about your precious Gibbon.  You do realize he’s playing with you, don’t you?  He could have sold that thing about fifty times the past six months.”

            “Oh, leave me _one_ of my pet delusions, sweetheart,” Brian said.  “You’re about to get the Don’s Tour of Oxford, you know,” he said to Buffy.  “I hope you can stand it.”

            “I’m sure it’s not as harrowing as the Slayer’s Little Sister’s Tour of Rome,” Buffy said easily.

            Elisabeth snickered.  “So Dawn’s got Rome down pat, eh.”

            “She’s got the best Italian of any of us by far,” Buffy said, rolling her eyes, “and takes care to say things under her breath that I’m _sure_ aren’t very flattering to me.”

            By this time they had reached the entrance, and pushed out into the grey English light of day, waving a final goodbye to Mr Sims the porter.

            As they set off up the walk, three abreast, Buffy in the middle, Buffy observed, “Speaking of Dawn, she tried to wangle her way into this trip by claiming there was a special copy of Perot-something she could use for homework.”

            “Brian’s the man to ask about Perrault,” Elisabeth said, without batting an eyelash.  “Did Dawn really try to use homework to take a vacation to England?”

            “Yes, she did.  I’m thinking I’m going to have to send her up here sometime, if she’s that desperate.”

            “No kidding,” Elisabeth answered, but the unspoken words hung between them:  _if this trip goes well_.

            Brian, unaware of the unspoken condition, launched into a peroration about Perrault spiced with wicked asides about dons they knew and the odd Member of Parliament, and thus they continued, harried by the occasional cold breeze, out and among the kingdoms of the city.


	8. The Way Back

_And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back._

_You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,_

_That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here._

_—_T. S. Eliot_, Four Quartets_

 

_Though she had been dreading it, an afternoon came when Elisabeth found herself alone with _ _Willow_ _._

_            “I’m sorry, I have to take this,” Rupert had said, with the phone to his ear; he had gone to the downstairs study and closed the door, leaving Elisabeth to wander about the rooms and explore._

_            Willow found her in the drawing room, lifting dusty figurines and glancing out windows.  “It’s nicer outside,” she said, startling Elisabeth so that she almost dropped a china shepherdess.  “There’s a twisty little path through the pasture and a view from a hill.”_

_            It was an obvious invitation, but Elisabeth hesitated._

_            “I won’t bite,” _ _Willow_ _ said, with equal parts winsome wistfulness and irritation._

_            At this, Elisabeth forced herself to relax.  “It’s not you I’m worried about,” she said.  “Let me get my shoes.”_

_            But if _ _Willow_ _ had wanted to have the Big Talk, she showed no sign of it as they toiled across the pasture and up the hill.  At a distance they could see rain coming, and they had brought no slickers, though Elisabeth had taken her windbreaker.  She glanced at _ _Willow_ _, who was wearing a T-shirt and a drooping hoodie that looked like it had belonged to _ _Tara_ _.  She had a sudden piercing memory of _ _Willow_ _, standing on Rupert’s doorstep in Sunnydale, in a shiny raincoat, with _ _Tara_ _ at her side.  And the words were no easier to say now than they had been when she arrived.  She could imagine, too, the feelings of guilt that could arise if someone offered condolences at a moment during which one was not feeling particularly bereaved; and when one was, one would have no ears to hear it.  It struck Elisabeth how odd it was for them to be here, _ _Willow_ _ and Elisabeth, and Rupert, alone in quiet country._

_            “A funny kind of shiva this is, I guess,” she said aloud, startling herself._

_            “Time for shiva’s over,” _ _Willow_ _ said flatly, picking up a stone and shying it over the waving grass.  “I missed it.”_

_            Elisabeth glanced at her, moved at the undertone of sorrow in the other’s voice; _ _Willow_ _ caught her glance and looked away, drawing a long breath._

_            “It’s a good thing that you’re here,” she said at last.  “I like that you make Giles happy.”_

_            This hurt worse than any recrimination Elisabeth could have imagined _ _Willow_ _ to bring.  She said nothing, not even the thing she was thinking, which was that she had been deeply afraid of making Rupert precisely the opposite._

_            “I didn’t want you to think I was jealous,” _ _Willow_ _ went on.  “I mean—not jealous in the romantic way, because that would just—I mean, there’s crushes, and then there’s...other stuff.”  She broke off, frustrated._

_            “You’re trying not to want to be a stockholder in your friends’ happiness?” Elisabeth guessed, awkwardly._

_Willow_ _ looked away and nodded.  “Something like that.  It doesn’t always work, though....He came back to _ _England_ _.  He came back to be with you.”_

_            Elisabeth stopped at the crest of the hill and gave a great snort.  “Hardly.”  _ _Willow_ _ turned to look at her.  “He came back to fight with me, and everybody else.  Did you not get that out of him?”_

_Willow_ _ shook her head mutely._

_            Elisabeth sat down wearily on a pile of stones near the fence, and told _ _Willow_ _ what had happened when Rupert had come back.  Her eyes went round when she heard about Rupert’s liquidating his books, but she relaxed when Elisabeth revealed that she now had them.  She rolled her eyes at the precis Elisabeth gave of her brush with the Council, and stared into the embracing clouds during the story of their un-courtship.  None of these expressions was alarming, and Elisabeth relaxed a very little._

_            “I did my best to get over him, you know,” Elisabeth said, brushing at the first droplets of rain that had begun to spit down.  “I even succeeded.  Just in time....”  She stopped._

_            “For me to try to end the world?” _ _Willow_ _ finished, bitterly._

_            “No.  For me to realize he was who I wanted.”_

_            There was a silence as the wind picked up to whistle sharply over the hill, skimming the grasses and hurling the small drops of rain harder against their faces.  The curve of green land below drew its mantle of rain against their gaze._

_            “Well,” _ _Willow_ _ said finally, with a matter-of-fact grimace, “looks like you’re one of us now.  Try not to die or anything, okay?  We keep losing lovers, and Giles has already had his turn.”_

_            Elisabeth burst out laughing, but sobered up quickly.  “I’ll try.”_

_Willow_ _ gave a pursed smile at her own black humor and pushed her rain-wet hair out of her face.  “Guess we oughta get back.”_

_            They started back the way they had come, cheerfully bedraggled, shoes meeting dust turning to mud, unburdened of speech.  But when they reached the house again _ _Willow_ _ said something that pressed the thorn home._

_            “Thanks for telling me all that stuff.  I couldn’t read his mind, you know, without hurting us both.  And anyway, Giles says it’s good to be out from under all the secrets,” she added meditatively as she shucked her muddy shoes off in the doorway.  “I guess he’s right.  Secrets make it hurt worse when the shit hits the fan.  Not that that stops anybody from keeping them.  I don’t blame him for running away.”  She peeled off her socks after, and started down the hall in damp bare feet.  “But I’m going to give him a hard time about those books.”_

_            Elisabeth stood, one shoe off in her hand, staring pensively after her.  Secrets.  She had managed an entire walk alone with _ _Willow_ _ without letting go of her secrets, and _ _Willow_ _ was admiring her for her full disclosure?_

_            Worse, did Rupert really think they were in for smooth sailing?  The ordeal ahead grew now before her mind’s eye and would not be ignored.  She could not warn him; she could not let him suffer in ignorance.  _Looks like you’re one of us now_, __Willow__ had said.  And a hundred thousand ways ahead of her that she could put a foot wrong and ruin it all._

_            “Well, not if I can help it,” she muttered jerkily, pulling off her other shoe and digging at her socks with a shaking finger.  As she struggled with the sodden terrycloth, a scutter of images crossed her mind’s eye as wind shakes rain from a tree after the fact of the shower: Tara’s hands, holding a handleless mug of tea, Tara’s hands pressed together as if in prayer, a suspension bridge of strength over the chaos of broken crystal fragments:  hands; Buffy’s hands, guiding her through dark Sunnydale streets, strong as Spike’s hands, both knowing and patient in their own way.  Knowledge and patience, keystones of Rupert’s character.  And guilt: her own hand shaping the air outside the convertible and Rupert’s voice, breaking—“I’m sorry”—and kindness.  Too much kindness, kindness too costly.  And under the kindness, a whirling darkness and nothingness that no one could solve._

_            Outside, the mantle of rain parted to let a spill of brilliant warm sunshine fall across the ancient doorstep; but Elisabeth shivered._

 

*

 

“And this is the study,” Rupert said, with a feeble gesture in the doorway.

            It was difficult to watch Buffy closely while pretending not to, but he couldn’t help making the effort.  Though he was beginning to have a sinking regret that he’d ever had the idea of showing her this house: he felt unexpectedly naked and defensive.

            Buffy, for her part, looked pensive, her lips held close together as she crossed the threshold and passed her slow gaze over the room.  “Nice,” she said.

            She wouldn’t have said “nice” on the night they’d banished Charles Bowen’s ghost; but it wasn’t such a misnomer now:  the rug he’d brought had been cleaned and retacked since the Plumbing Disaster, and though they had to do the walls yet before moving in the books, it already looked lived-in and inviting, the shadows benign.

            To him, it looked a hell of a lot better than “nice,” but he was determined not to be resentful of Buffy’s reticence.

            She had not said much since he’d arrived to take them to dinner, but the quality of the silence had changed from the night before.  Now, she looked faintly troubled, in that way that could lead either to passionate grief or cold fury.  Rupert wasn’t prepared to deal with either one in his current state, and Elisabeth had made no effort to clue him in on which to expect.

            For Buffy and Elisabeth had—what was the word?—clicked, that was for certain.  Even if he hadn’t caught them exchanging glances at his austere greeting, he’d have known it by the atmosphere.  And when Elisabeth mentioned casually over dinner that she and Buffy had lunched and toured Oxford in the company of Brian Whitaker, he had had to stifle a groan.  Buffy was already ill-disposed toward him; did Elisabeth _have_ to introduce her to someone who barely managed to tolerate him?

            Not that Buffy could reasonably have spent a month in Oxford _without_ meeting Brian, but Rupert felt nettled all the same.

            All in all, Rupert was glad to see Buffy and Elisabeth off from Pyke’s Lea.  It had been a disappointing consummation of four months’ planning.  As the sound of the car crunching away down the lane faded into silence, Rupert turned to survey his castle.

            The lights, newly rewired, were still dingy in some rooms, too bright in others, and naked altogether in the kitchen.  There was scarcely a wall that had been sanded, primed, and painted, and the bad light seemed to show up every pile of scraped paint and shaken dust.  The furnace had been replaced, but the ancient drafts of the house had commandeered the fresh heat and directed it to the least likely places anyone would want to linger.

            Flatfooted, Rupert went back to the study and opened the cabinet of the armoire he had recently moved into the one corner without bookshelves.  He reached past the jars of herbs and the bric-a-brac of spell paraphernalia, and took out a half-empty bottle of scotch and a tumbler sticky from last night’s use.  Without casting his glance any further round his home, he went to put his back against the wall and turn on the small portable TV he’d brought the day before.  He poured himself a glass of scotch and sat with it tucked in his arms crossed over his chest, watching the flickering screen between his feet.

 

*

 

Buffy lay awake and listened to the tck-a-tck of Elisabeth’s laptop keyboard out in the livingroom.  She had been glad to use Elisabeth’s work as an excuse to go to bed without checking her email or answering the text messages she knew she’d had from Willow and Dawn.  She wasn’t ready to tell them what she’d found here, wasn’t ready to say it out loud.  The world had ended like fifty times without stifling her words, and _this_ hovering disaster was too much to tell, perhaps precisely because it was so prosaic.

            She knew Giles well enough to know that his austere posturing hid a wound of guilt—but what guilt, it was impossible to guess, and it didn’t matter anyway because getting a bone away from a growling dog would be easier by far than talking him down from his illusions of responsibility.  Buffy hissed a weary sigh and kneaded the pillow fretfully into a better shape. 

            In the morning, Buffy hustled out of the warm bed and huddled into cold clothes—jeans that wouldn’t be ruined by paint splatters, a T-shirt, and a paint-dabbled sweatshirt Elisabeth had offered her the night before.  She ventured out of the bedroom, shoes dangling from two fingers, to find Elisabeth squinting over a steaming cup of coffee, dressed in sweatpants and a long-sleeved T-shirt that clearly belonged to Giles.  “Hey,” she offered tentatively.

            Elisabeth gave a wincing grunt.  “Get yourself some coffee, if you’d like,” she said, rusty-voiced.  “Rupert should be up by now, so I can drop you by the house any time you’re ready.”

            “Okay,” Buffy said, unsure whether she’d ever be “ready” to spend an entire day alone with Giles in his current state.

            But instead of voicing her misgivings, she filled the go-cup Elisabeth had put out for her with coffee, donned her shoes, and shrugged into her fleece jacket.

            In the car, Buffy filled the silence with a question:  “What are _your_ plans for the day?”

            Elisabeth sighed.  “Well, they were to go to the library and work.  But my vitality is rather low today.  I may just stay home and do some light reading.”

            “I thought your term was over for Christmas.”

            “It is,” Elisabeth said grimly, “but I’ve still got a huge backlog of work to make up from the time I missed in the spring.”

            “Oh,” Buffy said, lamely, hugging her handbag closer to her and shivering.

            “I have an extra coat if you want it,” Elisabeth said as she made the turn out toward Headington.

            Buffy shook her head.  “I’m all right.  The vitality thing’s hitting me too.  Bet Giles makes three of us,” she added, blurting.

            Elisabeth grunted, her only answer.

 

*

 

In the drive at Pyke’s Lea, Elisabeth set the handbrake but did not turn off the car or make any move to get out.  “Best of luck,” she said dryly, as Buffy slung her handbag over her shoulder and wrestled open the door into the chill air.

            Giles appeared on the doorstep as she approached the house, his face impassive, the morning light glinting off his glasses.  She grunted at him as she reached the steps of the porch; for answer he blew the steam off his coffee as he stepped aside to let her in.

            In the morning light the house looked livelier, less acquiescent to Giles’s black mood of last night.  She could hear the heater going, though its primary effect seemed to be to create a draft of warm air that occasionally tickled her fingers as she made her way to the kitchen.

            “So what are we doing today?” she said finally, as she added to the coffee in her go-cup from the pot on the counter.  She turned to look at him.

            He had come in and hitched his shoulder on the doorway, his eyes heavy-lidded behind his glasses and his hair clean but uncombed.  The expression on his face seemed to be a residual wince, which could mean anything.

            “The main issue,” Giles said, “is to get your bedroom painted.  The floor’s sanded, and the trim’s been done.  Once the paint dries we can move the basic furnishings in, and then we can all move out here.”  She said nothing and he hesitated, then spoke again.  “I’d meant for us all to be staying here when you arrived; but there was a delay.”

            “I heard about the plumbing thing,” Buffy said.  “Sounds like it sucked.”

            Giles drew a long breath for a sigh.  “Yes,” was all he said.

            She sipped her coffee, determined to wait for him to break the inertia.  Finally he straightened up from the door, set his coffee on the counter, and tipped his head for her to follow him out into the hall.

            The house seemed to be an exercise in miniature grandeur, Buffy observed as they went up the main stair.  Everything had been carefully measured to take up an exact amount of space, and yet care had been taken that the lines of the stair risers and the timbers of the walls should be broad and sturdy to the eye.  The broadness and sturdiness were very Giles; the unassuming compactitude very Elisabeth.  Buffy suddenly understood why they’d both been working so hard on this house: it was pretty much the only part of them both that had much chance at harmony.

            The bedroom Giles had chosen for Buffy was two rooms away from the master bedroom in the front corner of the house, a friendly distance.  It had one window looking out on the front orchard and, further out, the countryside, a palette of browns and faded greens—but still more green than Buffy would have expected in this cold.

            That Buffy’s gaze had immediately been drawn to the landscape outside was a testament to the virtue of the room: its lines were as broadly compact as the rest of the house, and though small it was so matter-of-factly comfortable that it made looking out as if from home natural.  Glancing around the room, Buffy saw that Giles had indeed been working hard on it; despite its emptiness it was more complete than any other room in the house, even the master bedroom, which though painted and nominally furnished with bed and nightstands, was also serving as a temporary home to two cardboard cartons, an unruly set of folding rulers, three books of paint chips, and two white-painted boards leaning against the wall awaiting some purpose or other.  Giles had not made the bed, either, she had noted as they passed the door.

            Altogether, a terrible glut of emotions was fighting for uppermost expression in Buffy’s chest, but, “I like this,” she said lamely.  “What color are we painting it?”

            Giles had been looking intently at her; at her words he relaxed invisibly but his gaze did not leave her.  “I chose a soft green,” he said, “to absorb the grey light you get from a north-facing window.”

            Buffy nodded, looking round on the floor for paint cans.  “The paint’s downstairs,” Giles said.  “We need to mask the floor and trim first.”

            They got to work.  Giles had acquired a stack of old newspapers; he brought them in along with three rolls of blue masking tape, and they lined the floorboards with paper, then taped it down and started on the baseboards and trim.  Giles stretched to his full booted height to paper over the built-in bookshelf while Buffy crawled along the wall unrolling broad swathes of tape over the boards.  Then Giles brought in some steps and even masked the edges of the plaster ceiling.

            When at last everything in the room had been defined in blue tape, Giles said, “Come on.  The paint and things are in the back hall.”

            They went down and retrieved the paint, trays, rollerbrushes, and gloves.  When Giles opened the paint and poured the first splash into the tray, Buffy was startled; the color looked much less like a soft green and more like an aggressive sage.  But she had a feeling it would look better on the walls than smudging Giles’s hands.  She shrugged out of her fleece jacket (it was still chilly in the house, but she’d warmed up doing the work) and reached for a rollerbrush.

            “There’re gloves if you want them,” Giles said.

            “Nah,” Buffy said.  If Giles wasn’t going to wear gloves, she wasn’t going to either.

            Briefly, Giles showed her how to go about applying the paint to the wall, using motions that were practiced and economic, which was so totally like Giles, to develop a technique for painting a room.  Buffy swallowed a sad smile and got to work on her chosen wall.

            As she laid the paint on, Buffy found herself warming not only to the work, but to the house and its owner.  Giles had been such a problem child lately, which was unlike him; it had both worried and exasperated her, the more so because she didn’t really understand what was behind it.  Elisabeth’s explanations had served to lay a baseline understanding, but it was the house itself that was making things clear.  That Giles had worked harder on her bedroom than any other room in the house; that he had showed it to her with such silent anxiety; that all his movements, and the obvious friction between him and Elisabeth, spoke of a stilted despair—all these showed a man who was building everything on acceptance while expecting, and courting, rejection.  Which now that she was here with him, was so much more than exasperating.

            But how to shake him out of it?

            “Dawn wanted to come,” she said.

            Giles grunted in reply.

            “She even tried to use research for school as leverage.”

            “Well, I dare say Elisabeth would have something to tell her about fairy tales.”

            “Probably,” Buffy said, thinking that it was just as well Elisabeth was spared Dawn picking her brain.  “I had to give her the credit card to shut her up.”

            Buffy had a wicked impulse to mention what Dawn had told her about Elisabeth’s virginity, but decided to save that ammo for some other time.  Besides, Buffy was feeling increasingly less comfortable with a casual disregard for Giles’s partner, not since she’d found out about Elisabeth and the First.  Whatever Giles had suffered, she thought resentfully, at least he hadn’t had to look at his own face worn by the First Evil.

            It occurred to her suddenly that Giles had been sending her gold-edged invitations to his pity party, and pouting till she RSVP’d.

            The paint went on with a sound like tearing paper.

            Presently Giles said, “I’m going to have to get the other can of paint.”  He moved, with the same deliberate misery, out of the room, and Buffy followed.

            Really, between her father’s cheerful betrayal and Giles’s morbid loyalty, Buffy was going to go stark raving.  She thought of the Christmas card reposing malignantly in her handbag next to the blank postcard from L.A., and reflected blackly that tearing either or both into shreds would not relieve her feelings in the least.

            At least she could return Giles’s favor and send him an invitation to that party.

            “Got another postcard from my dude who’s keeping tabs on Angel,” she said, bracing a hand on the wall and watching Giles pick through the labels on the paint cans.

            “Oh yes?” Giles said with light disdain, not looking up.  “God only knows what he and Spike are up to now.”

            He went on searching among the paint cans, but Buffy went perfectly still.  After a moment he sensed it and looked up.  “What?”

            “What do you mean,” Buffy said slowly, her voice taut, “‘he and Spike’?”

            “I meant Angel and Spike,” Giles said impatiently, “at Wolfram &amp; Hart.  You knew that, of course.  You knew it before I did.”

            “Spike’s dead,” Buffy heard herself say.

            Giles straightened slowly.  He had gone very pale.  “No; he isn’t.  You knew this.”

            “No,” Buffy said, “I didn’t.”

            “But—but I told you.  About the amulet and Spike winding up at Wolfram &amp; Hart.  I told you that; we quarrelled about it, remember?”

            “We quarrelled,” Buffy said shakily, “about the fact that Elisabeth told you Angel was at Wolfram &amp; Hart.”

            “Which wouldn’t have been such a shock if you’d bothered to tell me first,” he countered, as if they’d just had that fight five minutes ago.

            “How is Spike alive?  What did she tell you?”

            “But I told you this.  I mentioned that damned amulet fifty times.  It came from that place, and someone sent it back there, and Spike came out of it.”

            “Who?” Buffy demanded.

            “How should I know?” Giles said, his voice rising.  “I’m always the last to know these things—why are you asking me?”

            Buffy’s fists clenched despite herself.  “Don’t give me that bullshit.  And that ‘damned amulet,’ with Spike wearing it, saved the world, in case you don’t remember.  You didn’t _want_ me to know he’s alive again.”

            “Oh, I love that,” Giles said bitterly.  “Thank you very much for that umpteenth accusation of duplicity.  I told you what I knew.  I told you Spike was back with Angel.  That was the point of calling you.”

            “No, you didn’t! You jumped down my throat about Angel and that evil law firm and how I never tell you anything, when all the time, _when all the time_, you knew that your own girlfriend had the goods on all of us.  And you _hid_ that from me, so don’t tell me you’re so pure as the driven snow when it comes to perfect disclosure.”

            “You’re not saying anything new,” Giles said wearily, pushing his glasses up on his nose.  “You’ve accused me of this a hundred times before.”

            “Giles, it’s true!”  Buffy couldn’t stop her trembling.  “Why can’t you get a damn grip on this thing with Spike?  He saved the world—”

            “And I haven’t, of course,” Giles said, tossing his head.  “Which lets me out of the worthiness stakes for your respect.”

            Buffy talked over his words.  “You had no right to keep it from me.”

            “I didn’t!” he hissed, with sudden fury.  “I thought you didn’t need me to tell you.  What, do you think I’m going to walk right into a discussion of Spike’s corporeal status with you, knowing that you privilege him over me?  Knowing you’d speak to me exactly the way you’re doing now?  Knowing—” He paled even further and broke off.

            “Knowing what?”  She found herself planted face-to-face with him.  “What, Giles?  That as soon as I knew he was alive I’d run halfway around the world and throw myself into his arms?”

            “That’d tally with your usual disastrous sexual choices,” he said coolly, but his face changed as soon as he said it, as if he knew he’d gone too far.

            Buffy was too angry to care.  She leveled her deadliest voice straight at his eyes.  “You have no right to say that to me.”

            Suddenly he reddened and lifted his right hand to show her the back, the white scars and the trembling crooked fingers.  “Pardon me,” he said in a voice equally deadly, “but I think I do.”

            There was nowhere to go from here but violence.  They went perfectly still for an instant; then Giles broke the deadlock:  he turned to stalk into the conservatory and out of the house, visibly shaking.

            Buffy stood breathing hard and shaking as much as he had been.  Spike, alive.  And Giles had actually said she was a walking sexual disaster, actually said it.  That was the one thing she had counted on him never to say.  If he was that desperate—

            Suddenly she took off in a run, leaping the congregated paint cans and darting out the open conservatory door—and nearly cannoned right into him.  He was breathing long, hard breaths, fists clenched, staring sightlessly out at the wilderness beyond the back garden.

            “Giles,” she said, and he turned instantly to look at her.  Then went back into the house without a word.

            “Giles,” she repeated, following him.

            He picked up the other sage-green paint can, moving deliberately, and continued up the stairs.  She followed him.

            He went back into the bedroom and opened the paint can, with the same unhurried movements, and poured fresh paint into his tray.

            “So what happened to ‘You’ll never have anything from me but my support and respect’?” Buffy said bitterly.

            At first she thought he wasn’t going to answer her.  Then he said, rolling his brush carefully in the paint, “That was back when you still respected _me_.”

            She opened her mouth, but then he added, “A small window of time, but a meaningful one nonetheless.”

            Her throat ached.  “That’s not fair.”

            “No?”  He turned to apply the brush to his wall.  “Considering the number of aspersions that have been cast on my character, I tend to disagree.”

            “That has nothing to do with— What makes you think I don’t respect you?”

            “How about consistently choosing a vampire’s well-being and good opinion over mine, for starters?”  Up and up rode Giles’s brush, in a calm rhythm.

            “It didn’t have to be like that,” Buffy said.  “I shouldn’t have had to choose.  I wasn’t the one who—”

            “You weren’t the one who sacrificed.  You took a swan-dive off a tower.  I gave up my conscience piece by piece.  I hung around that cursed town far past my welcome, outlived my dignity by five years, buried one lover and attempted to kill another—I wasn’t blessed with resurrections, by the way, except yours, and you managed to make it a pretty bitter miracle considering how much I disgust you—”

            Buffy was too horrified to respond to any but the last phrase:  “You don’t disgust me!  Giles, what—”

            “I’m sorry, I should have been more clear.  It’s my kind that disgusts you.  I’m still a Watcher, you know.  I always will be, even though they’re going the way of the dinosaur, and good riddance, as you say.  I take your part in repudiating them, knowing I’m only sawing off my own branch.  But what else can I do?  I haven’t got any choice.”

            “But why blame me for it?  We were—we were together on it, once.  What did I do?”

            He lowered his brush and stared quietly at the floor.  “You turned eighteen.”

            His figure, and the green paint, blurred uncontrollably.  Buffy swallowed, and swallowed again.

            “I should have known then, of course,” he said softly, turning the brush over in his hand and addressing it with a quiet despair that only choked her further.  “It took Willow going dark for someone to say what everybody knew—that I was increasingly irrelevant.  I tried not to be bitter about it.  I did try, you know.”

            For a moment Buffy wanted to grab and shake him, make him rail at her again, anything but this.  Instead, she whirled and flew down the stairs, then pounded back up again digging in her handbag.

            “I’ll show you irrelevant,” she said, with the tears on her face.  “I’ll show you—”

She found what she was looking for and dropped the purse to work the card out of its envelope and shove it into his hand.

            Slowly, his face closed, he put down the brush and shifted the card to his left hand.  She watched him look from the inscription in one hand to the photo in the other, still impassive.  Then he turned the photo over and read the back.

            There was a silence.  Then he said:  “Your father named his son Caleb?” as if hoping he was misreading the name.

            “Yeah,” Buffy said.

            “When did you find this out?” he asked her, now looking at the front of the photo again.

            “When I opened this card,” Buffy said, her voice flat.  “On the plane here.”

            He did look up at her then, and though his expression was unreadable, it was Giles looking at her, and not the bitter stranger she had been afraid of seeing.

            Gently he returned the photo to the card and gave it back to her.

            “Don’t show me the address,” he said briefly, and returned to painting.

            Buffy wiped her nose on her sleeve, put away the card, and followed suit.

 

*

 

Oddly enough, now that the worst had happened, Rupert found it easy to finish the first coat of paint in Buffy’s bedroom, as if it mattered, and stand back to view their finished work with something resembling satisfaction.  “It’s a fast-drying paint,” he told Buffy, “but still we won’t want to add another coat till tomorrow.”  He assembled the painting paraphernalia, without looking at her, and carried it downstairs to clean on the back patio.

            Buffy did not follow him; she went instead into the upstairs bathroom to scrub her hands.  She had called Elisabeth on her mobile to apprise her of their plans for the evening and ask if Elisabeth would kindly bring her a change of clothes so they could go straight out.  Apparently Elisabeth had agreed without any cavil at all, which was ominous in its very lack of complication.

            As he scrubbed at his hands and the brush handles, Rupert heard the slow crunch of tires in the drive.  Shameful though it was, he remained hidden there, waiting for and hearing the sound of Elisabeth coming in the front door, of Buffy shuffling quickly down the steps to meet her, of their feminine voices together.  No, they had definitely clicked, and it did not bode well for him at all.

            At last Rupert forced himself to shake his hands dry and venture into the house, where he found Elisabeth receiving back the sweatshirt she’d lent Buffy and Buffy tucking her change of clothes, a bag of toiletries, and a towel under one arm, two steps up from her.  Buffy looked up and saw him.  “It won’t take me long to get ready,” she said brightly, and turned at once to climb the stairs.

            Rupert glanced out the way he’d come:  the late-afternoon sunset was not far off.  He had actually missed the deep trough of night one got with an English winter, but at the moment it was not helping his mood.

            Uncannily, Elisabeth quoted:  “‘Let me call/This hour her vigil and her eve, since this/Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.’  Which it actually is.  St. Lucy’s day, I mean.  The shortest day in the year is St. Thomas’s day, now, though; the fruits of 1752.”  He shot a nettled look at her, and her face got that look of bland docility that so irked him.  She turned, without addressing his glare, and went into the kitchen.

            He followed her, to find her pouring out the cold coffee and rinsing out the pot.  “So you’re taking Buffy out tonight,” she said.

            “Yes,” he said, pressing his lips tight.  If she meant to make a fuss now of all times….

            Worse; she went on quoting Donne.  “‘Oft a flood have we two wept, and so/Drown’d the whole world, us two; oft did we grow/To be two Chaosses—’”

            “Elisabeth,” he said, “_would_ you leave off?”

            Her lips twitched, and her expression sharpened, like the cat’s when it was planning to trip him.  “Speaking of drowning the world, I want to talk to you about this plan of yours.  A small warning.”

            “Keep it to yourself,” he said sharply.  “I’ve been keeping my head about drink since before you were born.”

            Elisabeth looked startled, but she gave a snort and kept on the offense.  “I doubt that.  But that’s not—”

            “In fact,” he said, talking over her, “I’d highly appreciate it if you’d refrain from any more critical remarks about my intake.”

            _That_ got a reaction.  Elisabeth drew herself up, straight and indignant.

            “I haven’t said _word one_ about your drinking,” she hissed, flushing.

            Rupert jumped into the quarrel with reckless relish.  “Oh, not _verbally_,” he said, in a disparaging snarl.  “As if I don’t feel you _looking_ at me, when I go down the pub.”

            She stared at him, aghast for a split second; then she enunciated furiously:  “So I worry about you.  Mea freaking culpa!”

            “You should be sorry,” he snarled back.  “As if I haven’t got enough on my plate.  And why you’d choose now to twit me about it, I don’t know, unless you want to indulge a puritanical sadism—”

            “A—You don’t even know what I was going to say!”

            “I don’t need to,” he said, with energy.  “You’ve been thinking it at me for months.  And I’m telling you now, Elisabeth, to mind your own God-damned business, or—”  But he’d run out of words, and what happened then dropped the guillotine on his satisfying rage.

            Elisabeth had gone white, and at his last words she took an involuntary step out of his reach.  Which proved exactly what he’d feared.  Which proved—

            “Are you afraid of me?” he demanded.

            She didn’t answer.  She stood perfectly still, eyes wide and wet behind her glasses.

            “_Are you_?”

            A small silence; then instead of answering his question, Elisabeth said slowly, holding her voice to a trembling low tone:

            “If you’re done, maybe you’ll care to hear what I was going to warn you about.  What I was _going_ to say, was that if you’re taking Buffy out to drink, you shouldn’t patronize her because she’s not good at holding her liquor.  Don’t lecture her about her ignorance of fine scotch; don’t make her drink something she doesn’t fancy; and don’t make fun of her if she orders a girly drink.  I rather think,” she said, holding back the tears by pure force, “that you can’t afford to patronize Buffy right now.  _That’s_ what I was going to say.  But _now_ all I have to say is, go to hell.”  She whirled on her heel and fled from the room.  He heard her steps pounding up the stairs, and a moment later a door slammed violently.

            He braced both hands on the counter, willing himself to breathe, willing the tremble in the pit of his stomach to calm itself.  Why he’d thought striking out at her and getting an actual response wouldn’t involve actually hurting her—or had he thought that?  Had he wanted to hurt her?  Was that what was behind his wild accusation of “puritanical sadism”?—which, _good show, Giles, well done indeed, you’ve just succeeded in putting into her head the awareness of a prejudice you didn’t actually have_.

            “When I read this card,” Buffy had said, “on the plane here,” and “I’m always the last to know,” he had said.  And, “I don’t want you in my sight till Elisabeth knows you’ve been coming to see me,” Anne had said.  And there were too many secrets and too much projection and too much chaos—

            “Giles.  _Giles_.”

            He shook himself to find Buffy at his shoulder, freshly washed and changed into dark jeans and a red turtleneck sweater, her fleece jacket over her arm.  “Earth to Giles,” she said.  “This is Houston.  What’s the problem?”

            “Not something NASA can fix,” Rupert said.  “You’re ready, then?”

            “Obviously,” Buffy said, lifting her arms to show her well-groomed state.  “Where’s Elisabeth?”

            “Er….”  He felt rather sick.  “She’s upstairs.  I need to….”  He went out of the kitchen without bothering to finish, and doggedly climbed the stairs.

            There was only one room whose door was shut, a room that they had not been working on but using for storage of materials instead.  He gave a tentative knock with one knuckle and then slowly opened it.

            Elisabeth had huddled with her knees drawn up in the farthest corner, shielded in by two cartons of books and the mattress for Buffy’s bed, upended against the wall.  She made no effort to pretend she was not still crying, but with an awkward dignity that made his heart hurt, she lifted her head, wiped her red nose on her hand, and stared into the middle distance to wait for him to speak.

            He cleared his throat.  “It’s nearly time for us to leave.  We can drop you home, or if you’d rather, you can catch a ride to the flat with—with Brian or somebody….”

            “No,” she sniffed, “I’ll ride back with you.”  She raised her arms and levered herself staggering to her feet.  He moved back from the door so she could get out, and trailed after her to the bathroom, where she turned on the cold tap and splashed her face over and over.  She reached for the hand towel, damp with Buffy’s use, and put her face into it, patting slowly dry and down.

            “Elisabeth,” he said, his voice scraping over emotion, “I—”

            Even before she spoke, she warned him off with a look in the mirror.  “Rupert.  Don’t.  Not right now.”

            He could not but respect that, but still he hesitated, meeting her gaze in the mirror for a miserable moment before wandering away to their bedroom, to change his shirt.

 

*

 

Rupert hung his leather jacket over the edge of the settle nearest the bar, and dropped wearily into the seat.  With a thoughtful glance round the small establishment, Buffy followed his example, sliding into the seat across the table.  “This isn’t the pub Elisabeth and I went to,” she observed.

            “No,” he said, leaving it at that.

            “She said that pub was where you guys all hang out.”

            “This one’s quieter,” Rupert said quellingly.

            Not that Buffy ever listened to his quelling tone of voice.  “What happened with her?” she asked, lifting her scotch for a sip.  Elisabeth’s fears to the contrary, Buffy had assured him in the car, without being asked, that she was going to match him drink for drink.  “Well, all right,” he had said, with a certain mirthless hilarity.

            “Nothing,” he said now, breathing in the bouquet of his own drink and taking a long sip.

            “Giles, that is such bullshit,” she said equably.

            “Well, what’d you expect?” he said, tilting his head with the sort of whimsical gesture that with Elisabeth often started a war of quotations and ended with a defused conflict.

            “I expect you to level with me,” Buffy said, setting her drink down firmly on the table.

            “Why?  Are we doing that now?”  Rupert said into his glass before another long sip.

            Not even that worked.  “You tell me.  You started it.”

            “Yes, and I’m having my regrets.”

            “Why was Elisabeth crying?  What’d you do to her?”

            “Of course.”  Rupert rolled his eyes.  “Of course I did something to her.”

            “Well?”

            “I don’t feel like discussing it.”  Rupert tried to lift his drink; but Buffy reached out swiftly and put her hand over the top of it.  “I thought we came here to drink,” he said, looking down at his imprisoned glass.  “This was your idea.”

            “Yes,” Buffy countered, “and I’m having my regrets.  Tell me about Elisabeth.”

            “Or what?” he said, glowering at her from under his brows.

            “Or I’ll go back to the flat and let you make a fool of yourself alone.”

            “Not the worst plan you’ve ever had.”

            But Buffy did not lift her hand from his drink.  She merely met his eyes, implacable.

            “I jumped down her throat on an ill-conceived pretext.  Happy?”

            “You’ve been doing that a lot lately.”  But she took her hand off his drink.  Rupert tossed back a generous sip before she could change her mind.  The scotch burnt a ragged path down his throat, and he coughed a little before smoothing it with another sip and putting the glass down to nurse.

            “And no,” Buffy said.

            “No, what?”

            “No, I’m not happy.”

            “Well, there’s a surprise.”  Rupert dug in quietly and prefaced his next words with another little sip.  “So does that constitute the agenda for the evening?”

            “That depends on you,” Buffy said.  “Also, for the record, scotch tastes like gasoline.”  She took a generous sip to match his, and her eyes watered.  “Or petrol, as you call it here.”

            Involuntarily, Rupert smiled.

 

*

 

Elisabeth wrapped herself in her robe and sat down to her laptop.  “So,” she said to the document file that was loading, “this, then, tonight.  This,” she sighed, “both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight is.”

            As she tabbed down through her own writing, she propped a feverish cheek on one hand.  Staring at a computer screen with a pressure headache from crying was not exactly optimum writing conditions, but what can you do?  Now that the worst had happened…well, no, not the worst.  The worst that could happen had either already happened, or wasn’t going to.  “I’m willing to give him a long anchor chain,” she had told Xander.  But now they were fishing in pretty deep waters.

            It was just as well she had no plans to sleep tonight.

            The phone rang.  Elisabeth shut her eyes and groaned.  If it was someone inconsequential, she didn’t want to talk to them, and if it was Brian, she _really_ didn’t want to talk.

            Ring.  Ring.  Ring.  Click.  “Hi,” her voice on the answering machine said.  “You’re talking to a small recording device.  Leave a reason to call you back.”  She’d been meaning to change that; she’d recorded that announcement in the spring, and it sounded altogether flat and aggressive.

            “Uh…hi.  Xander here, checking in,” the small recording device said.  Elisabeth jumped and fumbled for the handset.  “I—”

            “Hey,” she said breathlessly.  “It’s me.  I was just thinking about you, oddly enough.”

            “Oh, Elisabeth, hey.  Good.  I was wondering if I’d hit the right time.  Giles and Buffy aren’t answering their cell-phones.”

            “They’ve gone to hash out their issues over scotch,” Elisabeth said.

            “Doesn’t _that_ sound like fun!” Xander said.  “—You don’t sound good.  You okay?”

            “Sure.  How’s Africa?”

            “Big and continental.  What’s wrong?”

            “Nothing,” Elisabeth said, knowing at once that her tone was insufficiently convincing.

            “Tell me.”

            “Oh,” she groaned, “you don’t have time to hear all my shit.  I’ll tell Rupert you—”

            “I’ve got nothing but time,” Xander said.  “Lay it on me.”

 

*

 

“You still haven’t told me what it was you said to Elisabeth,” Buffy said.

            Rupert rubbed at his forehead.  “Buffy, can’t you leave it?  It’s not to do with you, if that’s what you want to know.”

            “Well, you were all jumping at the chance to talk to me over drinks, and now you’re all armadillo-y.  So my theory—it’s a wild one, get ready—is that you’re the one who can’t leave it.”

            He glared up at her from under his brows.

            “And furthermore,” Buffy said, “if you’ve been sending her the same invites to your pity party that you have to me, I have to tell you that you’re way off base.  You,” and her lips primmed at this fresh thought, “didn’t have the First Evil parading around wearing your face all day long.”

            A chill settled in Rupert’s stomach.  He drained the last of his glass of scotch (Buffy followed suit manfully) and set it aside.  “No,” he said, in a measured voice, “but I did have it parading around in yours.”

            Their eyes met.  Buffy looked away.  “So,” she said, “did you believe the stuff it said?  Or should I ask?”

            Rupert bought some time by going to get them more scotch.  He sat down with the drinks and took another strengthening sip before answering.  “Well,” he said, measuring his words carefully, “it was difficult to determine, after a while, which of you in the room was the real Buffy.  As to sorting out the wheat from the chaff, I was…increasingly less well-equipped to attempt it.”

            “Which is why you attacked her.”

            Rupert heaved a sigh and cast his gaze into the golden depths of his glass.  “She told you about it.”

            “I asked.”

            He felt suddenly weary and aged beyond repair.  “I…Elisabeth loves me very much,” he faltered softly to his glass.

            “Giles,” Buffy said, in a voice so gentle that he looked up to meet her eyes.  Which was when she let him have it between his.  “_Duh!_” she said.  “Are you still stuck on that?  Yes, she loves you, very much.  And this poses a problem exactly how?”

            “It doesn’t,” he said dully, “unless she’s wasting her time.”

            “That’s her problem,” Buffy said, taking an explosive sip of fine scotch.  “_Your_ problem is that you’re stuck in this I’m-so-unworthy gear-grinding crap.”

            He gave her a catlike look as he lifted his glass.  “So what exactly are you proposing?”

            “I’m _proposing_,” Buffy retorted, “that you _move the hell on_.”  Defiantly, she upended the half-full glass of scotch and drained it without a wince.

 

*

 

Xander offered a small sympathetic groan.  Elisabeth reached for a tissue.  “Sorry,” she sniffed.  “I didn’t mean to go all wobbly.  I just—I had my suspicions, but I was just blindsided all the same.  And I never meant to make him think I was all puritanical about it—I just left it alone, like he _wanted_—what else should I have done?”

            “He thinks you’re a puritan, that’s his problem,” Xander said firmly.  “You didn’t make him think that.  Your only so-called sin was that you were a witness to his being miserable, and in that case, he should just suck it up and deal.  Or not be your boyfriend anymore.”

            But that sent Elisabeth into fresh tears.  “I don’t know,” she wept.  “What if that _is_ what he wants?”

            “Aw, Elisabeth,” Xander said, and waited with almost audible concern for her to quieten before going on.  “I don’t think it is.  That’s not what it looks like to me.  But I’m not inside Giles’s head.  You ask me, I think he wants to have it out with Buffy, not break up with you.  But I can’t…you know.”

            “Well, that’s what I thought too,” Elisabeth said, regaining a more reasonable tone and wiping her face with the crumpled tissue.  “I thought maybe he’s been striking at me because he felt safe doing it—I mean, felt like it was safe for _us_.  But I’m starting to—oh, I’m just getting so tired.  It’s just a game, all this second-guessing and eggshell-walking, and I don’t have the energy to keep it up much longer.”

            “Well, if Buffy and Giles get some things straight while they’re getting their drink on, maybe you won’t have to.”

            “I hope so,” Elisabeth said, and was startled to hear the bitterness in her own voice.

            “Well, we all get kinda tired of the Buffy and Giles show now and then, you know.  It’s like, okay, you have Slayer-Watcher issues, we get it.”

            Elisabeth gave a watery chortle, and Xander went on.  Clearly she had touched a nerve.

            “I mean, really, sometimes I read their emails and think, _God_, just fuck already!”  He stopped suddenly.  “I mean—if you weren’t—that is, really—just a hypothetical-type fucking…And now I’ve just grossed myself right the hell out.  Just—forget I said….”

But Elisabeth was laughing: silently at first, then in a weary and unraveled chuckle.

            “Is that the laugh of ‘I think this is funny’ or the laugh of ‘I’m going to kill you’?” Xander said tentatively.

            “It’s funny,” she assured him.  “Also, in a few black moments I’ve almost wanted to say it myself.”

            Xander did laugh at this.

 

*

 

“Well, let’s see,” Rupert said, spreading out his fingers palm-up preparatory to counting, though the number in question was several hands’ worth.  “There was my parents.  My mother’s lullabies.  Quentin.  A Watcher you don’t know, who mentored me in my youth.  A couple other Watchers you don’t know, and some you do….All the girls I got there too late to save.”

            “How many was that?”

            He peered into the distance.  “Can’t remember.  Too many, anyway.  Had to kill one; mercy.  They more or less crucified her to the floor of her house in addition to the usual gut-spilling.”

            He was looking through his lashes at her, and saw that one go home, though she hid it well, tucking the corners of her mouth in firmly and lifting her glass.

            “Angel,” he said, and this time she did wince; but he was getting lost in the counting now.  “Joyce.  Jenny.  Some of the students—I’m losing their names, now.  The Mayor.  Spike.  A lot of Spike, actually, if that helps explain anything, though I doubt it does.  Randall.  Lot of him, too, but he never said anything.  Philip and Deirdre and Thomas.  Tara.”

            “You saw Tara?” Buffy said, blinking at him.  “I thought she was out of reach.”

            Rupert shook his head.  “I’m not sure Willow would have mentioned it if she did see her.”

            “No,” Buffy said, very softly.  She looked down at her glass, as if noticing for the first time that she had one.

            “How many are we on?” Rupert asked her.

            “I don’t know, I wasn’t counting.  The First was pretty busy, looks like.”

            “I meant drinks.”

            “Wasn’t counting those either,” Buffy said dryly.

            “You seem to be holding up,” he said, eyeing her closely.

            “Slayer metabolism.  I’m really not adept at the drinking.  Wow.  Adept.  I said the word ‘adept.’ D’ja notice that?”

            Rupert got up again, and Buffy took a long sip of the scotch that he put before her.  “This is starting to taste better.  You think my palate’s improving, or am I just drunk?”

            He snorted into a laugh.  “You really want me to answer that?” he said, languidly.

            “No,” she said.  “I can feel my liver pickling.”

            “I’ve got a head start on you with that.  Surprised Elisabeth didn’t use that as leverage.”

            “She got after you for drinking?” Buffy asked, peering at the grain of the table.

            “N-no…no, she pointedly didn’t.  But I called her on it.”

            “So that’s what you jumped down her throat about.”

            Rupert blinked, then cursed himself silently.  Damn his loose lips.  “She says she was worried about me.  She doesn’t…doesn’t need to worry about me.  I’m perfectly…but I shouldn’t have shouted at her.  Or… called her a puritan.”

            “You called her a puritan?  Giles, what the fuck?”

            “I don’t remember you swearing quite so much when you were younger,” he said, squinting at her in an effort to keep from giggling.

            “Yeah, well, that was then.”

            There was a small silence while Rupert finished off another glass and then sat hunched thoughtfully over the table, a bookend to Buffy with her hands curled round her glass, now cloudy with finger-marks.

            “And then there was the worst one.”

            “Yeah?”

            “There was Ben.”

            Buffy thought this over.  “Why’s he the worst?”

            “He’s the one I killed.  In cold blood, I mean.  To save the world and all that.”

            They were speaking quietly, drink clouding their eye contact.

            “I thought you said he died of his wounds,” Buffy said.  “I thought that’s what you said when….”

            “No.  I…” he dropped his voice to a murmur:  “I smothered him.  So you wouldn’t have to.  ‘Course, it ended up being moot anyway, didn’t it?  You not having to, I mean.  It was my job.”

            “Giles….”  She let go her glass and looked at him.

            “He was the one who finally broke me to go and kill Elisabeth.  I’m the one who does the dirty work, he said.  Well, of course he was right.”

            “Giles,” Buffy whispered, with intensity, “I didn’t ask you to kill for me.  I will _never_ ask you to kill for me.”

            “That’s what you don’t understand,” he said dreamily, pushing at his glass with a forefinger and staring into the smoke-aged rafters of the pub.  “You don’t have to ask.  Quentin talked a good game about wielding you…like a-a weapon on a chessboard—” there was something wrong with that sentence but he didn’t trouble to go back and parse it— “but the truth is…the truth is, we Watchers get our hands dirty.  That’s what our job is.  The Council didn’t want you getting your hands dirty because they didn’t want you to take their power.  I didn’t want you getting your hands dirty because…because you’re more valuable than I am.”  He thought that in the cold light of day, that would be shown to be an obnoxious piece of sententious crap; but it felt right to say.  “Remember when the First Slayer…?”

            “Got mad at us in our sleep?  Yeah.  She wanted me to be alone.”

            “She’s not wrong.”

            “Giles, of course she was wrong!  She—”

            “I mean,” he said doggedly, “we were a threat to your power by—entering into it, sharing it.  And now we’ve shared it with all these others, and they’re going to get their hands dirty.  And…I don’t want you to carry that.  It’s _my_ job.  I can’t stop being a Watcher, you know.”

            “You keep saying that,” Buffy said thickly.  “I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

            “Inconceivable!” Rupert said, and giggled.

            Buffy frowned.  “Didn’t know you saw that movie.”

            “’Lis’beth made me watch it one night.”

            “Good for her.”

            “How you doing?” he asked, craning his head to look at her glass.

            “I need another one,” she said.  “And so do you.”

 

*

 

In the end Xander gave his report to Elisabeth instead of Rupert.  She asked him for it, reasoning that there was no telling when Rupert’d be in the proper state for dealing with the info.  Xander agreed, clearly wanting to talk more, perhaps to maintain contact till she was steadier.  This comforted and irritated Elisabeth at the same time:  it was nice to have someone paying attention to her and not the Buffy-and-Giles show, but she hated anything with the least hint of patronage, and Xander was nothing if not youthfully chivalrous.

            Once Xander had given her the specifics of his situation—fortunately, they did not require immediate action on their part—they went on talking, but without direction, about the changes that had come into the world along with the extra Slayers.

            “I don’t suppose the actual power is diluted at all,” Elisabeth was saying, “but there’s got to be a fair amount of chaos round its manifestations.  I hope you’re keeping—”

            But a chiming sound interrupted her.  “Oh, damn, that’s my cell,” she said.  “Hang on.”  She rummaged about in the pocket of her jacket draped over her chair, and her heart sank when she saw the ID on the screen.  “I’m going to have to let you go, Xander.  I need to take this.”

            “Sure thing.  I’ll call Giles back in a couple of days.  And, Elisabeth—hang in there.”

            “I will.”  She thumbed off the phone and opened her cell with a deep sigh.  “Hello?”

            “Ah—yes, ma’am, is that Miss Bowen?”

            “Yes, speaking.”

            “This is Anderson, at the Black Key.  You gave me your card a few weeks ago.”

            “Yes, I remember.”  Elisabeth did not sigh again, but she did not need to.

            “Well, I have a…well, a bit of an awkward situation.  Your—your man is here, and he’s had rather enough for the evening, and you mentioned I should put him in a taxi for you if it got to that point.  But, well, he...has someone with him.  Shall I—?”

            “Oh, that’s all right.  Blond girl, slight, red sweater?”

            “Aye,” he said, sounding obviously relieved.

            “What condition is she in?”

            “Much the same as he, really.”

            “And that is…?”

            “In a fair way to be unconscious, ma’am, soonish, if I’m any judge.”

            “Well, don’t give them any more, and if you put them in a taxi I’ll pay at the end and come get the car tomorrow.”

            But there was a small hesitant silence on the other end. 

            “Well?” she said.

            “Well, ma’am, I’m not sure they’re exactly fit to manage the taxi.”

            At this Elisabeth groaned aloud.  “God.  How much did they have?  And what time is it, anyway?...Oh my.  I didn’t realize it was so late.  What do you suggest?”

            “I think,” he said, sounding relieved that she had not taken him to task for serving them too much, “I might have my sons drive them home in your car, since we’re closing and they’re fairly strong chaps.”

            She drew a long breath.  “Okay.  Let’s do that.”

            “This address on your card still correct?”  He read it off to her.

            “Yes.  Just round off the Iffley Road.”

            “I know the street.  Right you are.”

            “Thank you.  Thanks very much.”

            “Not a problem, ma’am,” he said, and rang off.

            Elisabeth snapped her phone shut and sprang up to pace around the flat.  Of course, it seemed the obvious conclusion to an evening like this.  What was she going to do with them in a comatose state?

            She flipped the porch light on and went into the bedroom.  Buffy had made the bed neatly in the morning, and the only disarray was the slight disorder Elisabeth had made getting out a change of clothes for her.  Elisabeth turned on the nightstand lamp and smoothed her pillow unnecessarily.  Then she gave a wolfish grin.  “It’ll have to do,” she said to the room, “and I owe Rupert a moment of discomfort anyway.”

            She waited by the front door, pacing slowly, for several minutes; then she made an impatient gesture and pulled it open to stare out into the chilly December night.  When the cautious slow headlights of their own car appeared at the end of the street, Elisabeth shivered and shook off a sense of deja-vu which at the moment she could not trace to its source.

            Slowly the car nosed its way into a parking space a few yards down from her door.  It paused, running, for a moment; then the engine cut and the lights went out.  She waited.

            The front doors opened and two burly young men got out, one in a heavy sweater and one in a jacket.  The sweater approached her at the door and stopped halfway up the steps.  “You Miss Bowen, ma’am?”

            “Yes,” Elisabeth said, as if they were delivering catering for a posh meal.

            “Right then,” the lad said cheerfully.  “We’ll have ‘em inside in two ticks.”

            It took both of them to wrangle Rupert gently out of the car, his arms over their shoulders, and they walked him very slowly up the steps, more than half carrying him.  Elisabeth submerged the painful shock it gave her to see him, head hanging as if in defeat, eyes nearly shut, drooping between the two young men; she swallowed and directed them silently into the house and down the short corridor to the bedroom, where they let him down gently onto the bed and lifted his legs up after him with the air of having done this many times before.  With a sort of rueful cheer they trooped back out into the night.  When they returned, one of them was carrying Buffy in his arms, like a small child who had stayed up past her bedtime, her boots bobbing with each of his steps.  She, Elisabeth could see by her face, was completely out.

            “Didn’t want to go at first,” the other said to Elisabeth.  “We managed to coax her into the car with him.  Stronger than she looks.”

            “Yes,” Elisabeth said, folding her robed arms over her chest to control her shivering.

            “I’m sorry—we’re letting all the warm out.  Bob!”

            “Where shall I put her?” Bob asked, half-turning with Buffy in his arms.

            “Same place,” Elisabeth said, laconically.

            “Right,” he said, without batting an eyelid.

            “Here’s their things,” the sweater said, handing Elisabeth the two leather jackets he’d brought in over his arm, and following them with Rupert’s glasses.  Elisabeth accepted them with a magisterial nod, then went to put them down and get a ten out of her bag.  The cat brushed by her and flitted down the hall like a black shadow to look in on Bob, then darted back to sniff at the sweater’s boots.

            “Uh-oh.  I’ll shut the door if you like.”

            “It’s not necessary,” she said, “he won’t go out.  Here’s for your trouble.  Thank you very much.”

            The sweater accepted the ten graciously and gave her the car keys in return.  “No trouble at all, ma’am.  Let’s get off home, Bob.”  He and Bob gave her identical nods, as how one should tip a hat without actually wearing one, and trooped their broad-shouldered way out of the flat.  Before she shut the door, she saw Bob calling for a taxi on his mobile, his breath streaming out in the cold, his cheeks ruddy.

            With the door closed between her and the world, Elisabeth drew strength in one long breath and went down the hall to look at them.

            Buffy and Rupert rested on the bed in the positions they’d been laid in, faces calm and somber, asleep by inertia.  Before Elisabeth could move past the threshold, the cat leapt upon the bed and picked his way between them, sniffing.

            They couldn’t be left like this, much as she’d like to.  “You going to give me a hand?” she said, offering a mordant smile to the cat, who looked back at her and exhaled sharply for answer, then bounded off the bed and out of the room.

            “Thank you ever so,” she called sarcastically after him.

            Elisabeth tackled Buffy first, feeling obscurely that her smaller size would be easier to maneuver.  She dug afresh into Buffy’s bag and finally drew out a set of pajamas—well-worn, with pictures of sushi on them.  She gave a half-breath of a laugh and rose with them, dropping them beside Buffy on the bed.

            It was no easy matter to hoist Buffy up into a sitting position, but Elisabeth managed to get her leaning against her own front, and began to work her arms out of the sleeves of her sweater.  Buffy stirred and made a small sound, like the cat when he was dreaming, but did not resist as Elisabeth, struggling, got her arms out of the sleeves and the hem up to her neck.  Then gently she worked the sweater over her head and off.  Buffy dropped her head to rest on Elisabeth’s collar.  “That’s right,” Elisabeth said encouragingly, more to herself than to Buffy.  “Now here’s your pajama top.”  Swiftly, she draped the pajama shirt over Buffy’s shoulders, unclipped and drew away her bra, and worked her arms into the wide sleeves.  When she was covered, Elisabeth laid her back down and fastened the buttons quickly, one by one.

            “Mm-mm,” Buffy said, frowning slightly.

            “It’s all right,” Elisabeth told her, reaching to smooth aside her mussed hair.  “You’re home.”

            Buffy gave a sigh and her expression smoothed again.

            It was less of a task to remove her boots and jeans and get the pajama bottoms on, but still it was awkward and difficult, and though Buffy was offering no resistance, Elisabeth could feel the latent strength in her limbs as she moved them.  But at last her work was done—Buffy lay soundly asleep in her sushi pajamas, if slightly more rumpled than if she had put them on herself.  Elisabeth fetched the trash can and put it by the side of the bed, then tugged Buffy over gently onto her side, just in case.

            At last she stood up, sweating, and turned her attention to the other side of the bed, the side she usually occupied.  Rupert was going to be heavier and more awkward, but at least she didn’t have to dress him in pajamas. 

            She also didn’t have to be as gentle.  One by one his boots thunked to the floor, then his silent socks.  Then she unbuttoned his shirt and eased up his shoulder to work the sleeve down and off.  Then the other; then the shirt joined her discarded robe on the chair.  Rupert slept on, his breathing heavy in his nose.

            But as she reached for the buttons of his jeans, he stirred and drew himself into a faint gesture of resistance.  “It’s all right,” she told him, as she had told Buffy.  “You’re home.”

            “’Lis’beth,” he mumbled.

            “Yes,” she said, not quite graciously, and began to tug his jeans off him.  When she had wrangled them down to his knees, she paused, panting, and lifted briefly to look at his face.

            “’Lis’beth…loves me…ver’ much,” Rupert mumbled.

            For the space of five seconds she was paralyzed, bent over him and staring, in a moment of polarized sensation that she could hardly even identify as emotion.  Then time released her and she bent again to her task, swallowing and swallowing again.

            “Yes,” she said, working his jeans down to his ankles and pulling them off inside-out in three sharp but gentle jerks, “yes,” she said, “she does.”

            Rupert said no more, but subsided into full unconsciousness, peacefully sleeping in his T-shirt and boxers.

            Blinking away tears, Elisabeth hauled at him gently till he also was on his side, then worked the covers slowly out from beneath him and pulled them over him.  A curl of his hair, gold and grey in the lamplight, lay against her pillow like a living paintbrush.  Exhausted, Elisabeth could not face doing the same for Buffy as well, so she went and got her afghan from the livingroom and spread it over her.

            Then, shaking, she went to the bathroom and stood with arms braced at the sink, breathing down nausea.

            “Get it together, Elisabeth,” she said softly.  Then she dragged herself away, back to the bedroom for her robe, and padded into the kitchen to make a cup of tea, knotting the tie wearily round her middle.

            It was just as well she had no plans to sleep tonight.

 

*

 

She did, however, wind up dozing, curled up in a corner of the couch; Elisabeth had never been very successful at pulling a true all-nighter, and she was tired.  Warm with sleep, she drifted just under the surface of consciousness, with the words she had been working with skittering about her mind, half-threaded on a snarled line of anxiety.

            A sudden, hoarse cry broke the silence of the flat, and her eyes snapped open.  The cry was followed by another, and a slithering thump that shook the flat.

            Elisabeth bolted off the couch and toward the bedroom.

            Rupert was disentangling himself from the sheets and struggling to his feet, where he then backed into the chair and put a hand against the wall.  On the other side of the room, Buffy had vacated the bed more gracefully and now stood wide-eyed with the bed between her and Rupert.

            Swallowing a smile, Elisabeth folded her arms and lounged against the doorway.  She rather wished Xander were here for this.

            Buffy turned her head and gave him a wide, dubious look.  “What…exactly…did we…?”  Then she looked down.  “Hey.  I’m wearing my sushi pajamas.  I didn’t think I was coherent enough to….”  She stopped, seeing Elisabeth in the doorway.

            Rupert looked too, and visibly recoiled.  “Elisabeth—”

            But apparently her languid amusement was evident enough that he relaxed slightly.

            “You’re all right,” she said finally, relenting with a small smile.  “I put you to bed and made sure you didn’t pull a Jimi Hendrix.  You slept pretty peacefully.”

            “That was smart,” Buffy said, then turned to Rupert.  “Jimi Hendrix—”

            “I _know_ what happened to Jimi Hendrix, Buffy.”  Rupert gave her the squinting glare he reserved only for her.

            “Oh.  Right.  I guess you do.”  Buffy actually smirked.

            “You weren’t even born then,” he added irritably.

            “Well,” Elisabeth said briskly, “if you two are done with the bed, I’d like to use it for a while.  I’ve been working all night.”

            Buffy blushed.  Rupert turned a remonstrative glare on Elisabeth, but met her eyes and shut his mouth.  “Should make some coffee,” he muttered, and eased past her out of the room.  Behind her, Elisabeth heard the bathroom door shut.

            “I think he beat you to the bathroom,” Elisabeth said to Buffy.

            Buffy didn’t move.  “Elisabeth…are you…are you okay?”

            Moving at last to the bed where Rupert had fallen out of it, Elisabeth offered her a wry, calm glance.  “Things are usually better in the morning.”  She picked up the tangled sheet and began to straighten it on the bed.  Buffy watched her turn over the pillows and beat them lightly.  Finally she shifted into movement, as if catching herself at a bad habit.  “I think…I think,” she said, yawning and putting her fingers to one temple, “I’m going to make that coffee.”  She gave Elisabeth a final sheepish glance and slipped out of the room, tugging at the skewed waistband of her pajamas.

            Elisabeth spared her only a glance as she went.  She was suddenly helplessly, terminally tired.  Without bothering to care about the logistics of Buffy and Rupert getting dressed while she slept, she shed her robe and crawled between the straightened sheets, which (thankfully) smelled primarily of Buffy and only a little of inebriated Rupert.  She pulled the ponytail holder out of the messy bun she’d made of her long hair, dropped it on the nightstand, and buried her face in her pillow.

            Things were usually better in the morning.  Especially if she was unconscious.

 

*

 

They were mostly silent on the way out to the house.  For one thing, the light hurt, the jolts of the car hurt, and in fact, Buffy reflected, taking stock, there were very few things that _didn’t_ hurt.  Judging from his dogged grip on the steering wheel and his heavily-narrowed eyes behind his glasses, Giles felt much the same.

            “Are we going to be able to deal with the smell of paint?” Buffy said, as Giles pulled gingerly into the gravel lane.

            “Dunno,” he said.

            “Maybe we should do _outdoor_ things for a little while,” she suggested.

            He grunted; but as she followed his movements getting out of the car and toward the back of the house, it seemed he was following her advice.

            Inside the barren conservatory, Giles became somewhat verbal.  “I’d like to clear out the stuff in the study; after your room, it’s the room I want to get livable soonest.”

            “What about your room?” Buffy asked.

            “What about my room?  It’s ready to live in.”

            “It’s a mess.  You going to clean it up before you both move in?”

            He turned to look at her briefly, an appraising look.  “Yes.  I imagine I will.”

            Buffy refused to drop her gaze, and after a moment he continued on his way through into the back hall of the house.

            The “stuff” in the study turned out to be an aggregation of paint cans, tarps, tools, and fresh boards.  There wasn’t room in the conservatory for the length of the boards, so after moving the other things into a corner, they went back into the study and opened the French doors to remove the boards.

            “Will these be okay outside?” Buffy asked.

            He swung round to look at her, but instead of the exasperation she was expecting, she saw that he was faintly amused.  “I’ve got a set of tarps waiting for them.  They’ll stay dry if they’re properly covered.”

            Sure enough, he took her to the spot he’d chosen and gave her an end of a tarp to spread over the dead grass.  Then they returned to the house to move the boards one by one.

            “What are these going to be?”  Buffy asked him as they maneuvered the first ones (heavier than they looked, though more unwieldy than difficult for Buffy to manage) into an organized pattern on the tarp.

            “Some of them are going in the attic, to fortify the bit I’m making up there,” Giles replied, grunting as he got up from his kneeling position on the cold turf.  “Some of them are shoring up the weak doorway in the kitchen.  And some…well, I imagine I’ll find a use for them.”  He dusted off his hands and started back down the slope of lawn to the house for more boards.

            It was as they were hoisting the last board to the pile that it happened:  Giles lost his grip on the smooth surface of the wood, and the board slid sideways out of his hands, cracking him on the head before skimbling heavily to the ground.  Giles stumbled backward and sat down hard on the cold grass with a pained grunt.

            “Giles!”  Buffy tossed away her end of the board and darted toward him.  “Are you all right?”

            His head was tucked down, his teeth bared in what she recognized as a silent laugh of misery.  “I—” he uttered— “you know, I rather think not.”

            “Oh, God.” She dropped to her knees next to him.  “A concussion, do you think?”

            “No, not my head,” he said, wagging it slowly and putting his hand to the place the board had struck.  It was starting to swell a little, but the skin wasn’t broken and it didn’t look worse than any of the other head injuries he’d ever had.  “Hardly noticeable what with the hangover and all,” Giles said lightly.  He was still giving that clenched, mirthless laugh.  “Wasn’t talking about that.”  He glanced up at her, and what she saw in his eyes made her reach without thinking and gather him awkwardly into a hug.

            His muscles were harboring a fine shiver, undetectable by sight; after a moment he gave in a little and lowered his head restively to her shoulder.  Buffy sucked her lips in and held onto him gently.

            After a long moment, when she judged her voice would be stable, she said:  “I haven’t forgotten the stuff you said.”

            She felt him sigh.  “Oh…damn.”

            “I’m gonna think about it.”

            “You don’t need to,” he said, half-despairingly; but his hand brushed her arm in a small but unmistakable gesture of gratitude, and she did not rebuke him for passive-aggressive maundering.

            “I’m not sure how it got like this,” she said at length.

            “I’m fairly sure it’s not just us,” he answered.

            “No.”  She pulled away and eased her legs to sit on the ground next to him.  Overhead the clouds were soft, grey, and fluid, and the occasional breeze sharply ruffled the grass at their feet.  The silence was as near complete as anything she had known outside of the desert.  In fact, it felt much the same: everything, voices, faces, relationships, stripped to their starkest simplicity.  She thought of Elisabeth, whom she’d last seen burrowed in the bed at the flat, long hair tangled on the pillow, face shut in sleep and poorly-hidden grief.

            “I think you owe Elisabeth the largest bunch of flowers you can buy,” she told him.

            He had relaxed somewhat and was sitting with his wrists resting on his knees, looking out at the grey quiet.  “She doesn’t like flowers,” he said.

            “Well:  what _does_ she like?”

            He thought about it.  “Light,” he said finally.  “She likes light.”

            “Well then,” Buffy said.  She got slowly to her feet and stood before him.

            “Well, what?” Giles said, blinking up at her.

            She reached down a hand to help him up.

            “Then give her light,” she said.

 

*

 

It was late when Giles brought Buffy back to the flat.  He parked briefly on the street so that she could get out.

            “Aren’t you coming in?” Buffy asked him.

            He shook his head, looking ahead into the dark.  “Not yet,” he said, answering her thought rather than her words.  “Have some things to do,” he added.

            “Okay,” she said, after a pause.  “Good night then.  I’ll see you tomorrow when we start moving.”

            “Right,” he said; she shut the door, and he pulled away slowly.

            Buffy toiled wearily up the steps to the flat and unlocked the door with the key Giles had given her.  Inside, she was relieved to see Elisabeth awake and alert, leaning backward in her desk chair to look round and greet her.

            “Hey,” Buffy said.  “You get Giles’s message?”

            “Yeah,” she said.  “You must have got a lot done, if we’re set to move tomorrow.”

            “Yeah.  I’m beat.”

            “Well, there’s sandwich makings in the fridge, if you’re hungry.”

            Actually, despite the fact that they’d stopped for dinner an hour ago, Buffy was hungry.  She got up from where she’d flopped on the couch and wandered toward the kitchen.  “How’s the writing going?” she called back to Elisabeth.

            Elisabeth waved her hand in a see-saw gesture.  “Eh.”

            “Well, you look a little better.”

            Elisabeth turned around to smile at Buffy through the kitchen doorway.  “So do you, if it comes to that.  I got up and managed to make the late service this morning.”

            Buffy blinked at her uncomprehending.

            “Third Sunday in Advent,” Elisabeth explained.  “I’d have hated to miss it.”  She turned around again and put her hands to the keyboard of her laptop.

            “Oh,” Buffy said.  “Right.”  She hadn’t even noticed it was Sunday.  She also hadn’t thought of church as something someone might dislike missing.  She went frowning thoughtfully to the fridge and opened it to survey her options.

            When she came back into the livingroom with a large sandwich and a soda, she nested in the corner of the couch nearest to Elisabeth.  The cat jumped up and sniffed at the edge of her plate before settling down.

            “So how’s Rupert?” Elisabeth asked, casually, as she typed.

            “I think he’s gonna be okay,” Buffy answered.  “He perked up a bit after we got all that work done.”

            “Your room’s ready?”

            “Yep, all green and everything.  We’re letting it air out a bit before we put the furniture in tomorrow.  What church do you go to?”

            She hadn’t intended to ask that question, but curiosity, and discomfort about discussing Giles, had prompted her to blurt.

            Elisabeth shot a wry glance her way.  “A little church off St. Aldates.  St. John of Patmos.”  At Buffy’s look, she added, “The writer of Revelation.  Natch.  It’s actually a comparatively harmless place.  The biggest uproar it’s had in recent times was the Vestry Meeting of Great Acrimony in 1999.  According to Anne, who’s the vicar there.  She’s a friend of mine and Rupert’s.”

            It was hard to imagine Giles being friends with a priest, but then it was hard to imagine him calling in a favor from a demon, and he’d done that. 

            “It was she,” Elisabeth said, raveling the thread, “who teamed up with Brian to nurse me back on my feet.”

            There was a faint wistfulness in her tone, as if she would rather not have collapsed in the first place, but would not deny her friends their due.

            Buffy asked:  “So…uh…how exactly did Giles and I get home last night?  My memory is kinda dim on that point.”

            Elisabeth said simply, “The landlord of the Black Key called me, and offered to have his two sons drive you both home and get you in the door.  So they did, and I tipped them handsomely and put you to bed.”

            “Have they had to do that before?” Buffy asked, in a low voice.

            “No,” Elisabeth said.

            “But you were expecting it.”

            She drew an impatient breath, but let it out in a deep sigh.  “Eventually, yes.  I gave the man my card just in case.”

            “Does Giles know that?”

            “Probably not,” Elisabeth said dryly, “but apparently he suspects me of wishing to interfere.”

            “I don’t know what he said, but I think he’s really sorry about it,” Buffy said.

            Elisabeth turned to her an amused look.  “I know he is.  Else he would have come in with you tonight.”  She smiled at Buffy, then turned with an air of resolution to her laptop.

            Buffy looked down at her sandwich.  She had only taken a few bites, and now was not really hungry; but she ate it anyway, then got up and washed her dish.  By the time she went to bed, Elisabeth had regained the momentum of her typing and paused only to smile her a goodnight, her glasses low on her nose.

 

*

 

“All right, there?” Giles asked.

            “Yeah,” Buffy answered from the back seat.

            The three of them had spent the better part of the morning moving the things they would need from the flat to the house.  Giles had arrived about nine, with the air of one who has risen early, and they had brought their first carload to Pyke’s Lea, the coffee from their cups steaming in the chill.  As it fell out, it was Giles and Elisabeth who put together Buffy’s bed, as they were familiar with its workings; Buffy was pressed into service to hold up the frame while Elisabeth wriggled under it to tighten the bolts.  Secretly, Buffy watched them work together, and was pleased to see them treat one another with increasing gentleness.  When Elisabeth asked Giles for the Phillips-head screwdriver, her voice (muffled as it was under the bed) was nearly trouble-free; and Giles handed it to her without the restless trepidation he’d used to her when he first arrived.

            They broke for sandwiches at the flat after the second trip, and now, with the last carload carrying their own clothes and personal things, they were on their way to the house for good.  Buffy was carrying the cat, who was thin and alert in her arms.  When Giles started the car and pulled out into the street, the cat twisted in her grasp and looked round out the windows, his front paws pressed into her front, eyes wide and pupils small.  The sun, the first English sun Buffy had seen, cast a watery light over them and showed the dust on the cat’s black coat, turned his eyes to green gold.

            Now, halfway there, the cat’s paws were braced less urgently on her chest, and though his ears still swiveled sharply, pricked for danger, the expression on his face had taken on a hint of curiosity. 

“I think he’s calming down a little bit now,” Buffy said.

            “Good,” Elisabeth said from the front.  “Thanks for holding him.  When we brought him from Bath to my flat, we put him in a pet carrier, and oh, was he mad.  When we let him out he gave us the dirtiest look you ever saw and shot out to hide behind the toilet.  I was afraid to use the bathroom for a whole day—didn’t seem smart to expose my bare backside to those claws.”  She glanced back affectionately at the cat, who moved an ear to catch her voice.

            “He was madder at me,” Giles said.  “He likes you better.”

            “You’re his job,” Elisabeth said playfully.  “I’m his friend.”

            Giles snorted.

 

*

 

At the threshold of Pyke’s Lea, Buffy put the cat down to make his own entrance.  Elisabeth stood, hugging the bedding for Buffy’s bed to her chest, and watched him closely.  Whiskers and ears pricked, visibly sniffing the air beyond the open door, he picked his way a few steps inside; then all at once he broke into a light canter and disappeared down the hall.

            “That’s all right then,” she breathed.

            Buffy and Rupert nodded relieved assent and they all went inside.

            Elisabeth made it her first business to make up Buffy’s bed, so she went upstairs at once.  As she worked the bedskirt across the box-spring, she listened to the sound of Rupert’s and Buffy’s voices downstairs and the clatter of their efforts to straighten up the kitchen with all they had brought for it.  It seemed they were making a very good recovery from their night of debauchery, and from the reason for it.  And it seemed that this recovery had eased some of Rupert’s constrained behavior to herself.

            Steadily her hands smoothed the fitted sheet over the mattress.  Xander was right: this was what Rupert wanted, their four heads under the roof of his beloved house, and happy.

            On went the flat sheet, and the pillow into its case.  As she picked up the comforter to shake out onto the smooth bed, Rupert came in carrying a light nightstand and a lamp, and moved politely around her to set them up next the bed, under the window.

            “I haven’t seen that lamp,” she said.  “Where did you get it?”

            “I found it in an antique shop down the street from St. John’s,” he said.  “You know it?”

            “I’ve seen it,” she said, “but I haven’t been in.”

            “I was pleasantly surprised,” he said, his hands straightening the frosted glass shade and centering the wrought-iron base on the small table.  He plugged it in and turned it on, and the green room glowed.  Without discussing it, he moved to help her spread the comforter over the bed and pull it straight; while she arranged the sham over the pillow, he spread the small rug he’d brought on the floor next to the bed.

            “It looks good,” she said, stepping back to admire the total picture.

            “It does, doesn’t it?” he said shyly, next to her.

            She smiled at him; then went out and downstairs.

            In the kitchen she put on water for tea, and got the beef cuts out of the freezer for Rupert to make into stew for dinner.  When Rupert followed her in, she said, “I got out the—” but stopped at the look on his face.

            “I got something for you, too,” he said.  He drew his hand into the room from the hall.  Resting on his palm was a small candle-stand, with a candle burning in it.  The curved shield was made of a mosaic of stained glass so delicate that the white glass in it shone like diamond and the colored like a rose of aquamarine, peridot, and topaz.

            He held it forward to her, chin down, with an expression of grave anxiety in his eyes, and she knew what it meant.  She swallowed and slowly reached to cup his hand and shift his gift to hers.  “Thank you,” she whispered at last, with the candle burning now on her own palm.

            He stood silent, with an air of awaiting judgement, while she studied her gift.  Finally she said:  “It’s beautiful.  I….”  She stopped, for a moment paralyzed by the same polarity of feeling she had felt the night she had put him to bed.  Then she went on, looking up at him:  “I…I’m going to take this and find where it lives.  Thank you,” she said again, and moved gently round him to take the burning candle upstairs.

            In the bathroom the shower was going:  Buffy, removing the grime of the move.  She went into the master bedroom and slowly sank onto the made bed, laying the candle on her nightstand.

            The light flickered and winked brightly at her in many colors.  She sat, dry-eyed, looking at it and unable to understand why she had been seized by such fear and despair.  “I can do this,” she whispered to it almost inaudibly.  “Can’t I?”

            _One candle is sufficient._

            With a sudden gesture of desperation, Elisabeth got up and blew the candle out, then grabbed her jacket.  Downstairs, she heard Rupert clattering in the kitchen; she went past without encountering him and slipped out the front door.  Down the lane and out to the road her steps drove her; she walked doggedly on the gravel verge, hands deep in her jacket pockets.  Overhead the late sun sparkled on damp leaves and cast a lengthening shadow ahead of her as she moved.  The air was fresh and cold, but it was not working to clear her mind.

            She walked until she grew tired, then crossed the road and turned into a cattle path that wound its way to a lonely stone wall overlooking a field.  There she sat, hands braced next to her, eyes devouring the tranquil scene as if it might hold some clue inscribed in the gentle wave of dry grasses, or the ridge of trees against the deepening sky.

            _Oh God_, she breathed, _what is this?  What do I do?  How do I go on from here?_  But instead of answer she found herself falling further into a dizzying doubt.  Her gorge rising, she rode the waves of horror, waiting for them to abate.

            She sat for a long time, shivering with both cold and fear, unable to form a thought-thread in the labyrinth, or even to quote herself a soothing line.

            “I don’t know what to do,” she whispered to the empty field.

            That in itself was no comfort, but saying it aloud leached her fear of some of its power.  As the sun lowered she sat and breathed her way back into a semblance of equilibrium.

            A step sounded to her left, and she turned to see Buffy, with her fleece jacket zipped to her chin, standing at the head of the path.  When she saw that Elisabeth found her welcome, she moved forward to meet her.

            “Giles sent me to tell you dinner’s about ready,” she said, her cheeks pink and filaments of her hair flipping in the breeze.  “Only he slipped and called it tea.”

            Elisabeth found she was able to smile.  “Yes.  I’m ready.”  She got off the wall: her backside was icy from her stone perch, and she massaged it gently.

            They walked back slowly, the setting sun in their faces, their silence tinged with sadness but comfortable.  At the head of the lane to Pyke’s Lea, Elisabeth paused to breathe in the vesper air, gazing with somber pleasure at the way the light hit the aged brick, the glimmer of glass in the dormer windows.

            “It’s a lovely light, isn’t it?” she said to Buffy, and went ahead to go in to the warmth of the house.

 

*

 

Buffy was worried.  It was plain to her that Elisabeth was suffering from a great weight of…something, and that Giles’s obvious efforts to win her forgiveness weren’t helping.  She had watched him prepare dinner with his usual quiet dexterity, but spotted the telling gestures in the careful way he set the table, in his long perusal of the wine rack, in the wiping of his faintly-trembling fingers on his apron.  The apron was amusing, but somehow made his air of anxious concentration and refusal to glance out the window more ominous.

            “Would you go find her?” he said to Buffy at last, without looking her way.  “It’s almost ready.”

            Buffy zipped up her jacket and went out, glad of the errand.

            It was not difficult to find Elisabeth; the road was really only walkable in a westerly direction, and Elisabeth’s footprints were easily visible in the damp mould of the verge.  The cattle path was an inviting place to turn, and she soon came within sight of Elisabeth, sitting very still on the wall.  When she turned her head, Buffy could see even at the slight distance that she had not been crying.  Buffy felt obscurely that it would have been better if she had.

            But as they returned to the house, she was oddly relieved when Elisabeth paused to look at the light of the sunset as it lay on the house, with an expression less masked than before.  She started again up the lane, and Buffy followed a few paces behind, breathing what was almost a wordless prayer.

            The light inside the house was as warm as the dying sun was cold.  Shivering, Buffy hung up her jacket on the new row of coat pegs and chafed her numbed, stinging hands together.  Elisabeth had gone ahead, and she heard her bump into Giles in the kitchen doorway.

            “Oh! sorry,” she heard him say, and “sorry!” she said almost at the same moment.  Then she said:  “Do you need help?”

            “No…wait, yes.  You can get that tureen of peas off the counter.”

            “Right.”

            Buffy went forward, through the mixed warmth of the hall, into the dining alcove off the kitchen, where Elisabeth was nudging aside the butter to make room for the peas and Giles was pouring red wine.  “Half? or full?” he said, moving from his glass to hers.

            “Three quarters,” Elisabeth said.

            “Buffy, would you care for some?” Giles asked, looking up belatedly.

            Buffy would have refused, thinking that the more space she put between herself and the alcohol of the other night, the better; but something in his look, and the inviting darkness of the wine, prompted her to say, “Half a glass.”

            He duly poured it for her, then put the bottle on the sideboard and took his seat.  Then he raised his glass as if to toast; Elisabeth picked up her glass and clinked his gently, then offered to clink Buffy’s.  They all sipped; the red wine was warming to the taste, as Buffy had hoped.

            Slowly, as they heaped their plates with Giles’s cooking and satisfied their well-earned hunger, they turned to light conversation.  Elisabeth detailed the section of the thesis she was working on (an expansion of a previous paper about George Macdonald and his layering of reality); and Giles offered a corollary example from a German fairy tale that was based on _Undine_.  Buffy watched Elisabeth covertly as he talked: she regarded him at first with the tilted frown of an academic; then her lips thinned pensively, and she looked through him rather than at him for a moment.  Then she turned her attention to her plate again, took a sip of wine, and took up his point about soul-ravished lovers with “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” which Buffy actually remembered from her long-ago studies in school.

            “That’s the one where the guy kisses her eyes shut and then wanders around all emo, right?”

            Giles hid a smile in his glass of wine, but Elisabeth turned her smile openly to Buffy.  “Yeah, pretty much.  The interesting thing, though, when you compare it to the Macdonald, is the idea of liminal landscapes.  We only have liminal landscapes, pretty much, if we make them; but in faerie, they’re literalized.”

            “And on the Hellmouth,” Buffy said.

            Elisabeth gave her a knowing smile.  “And on the Hellmouth.”

            “Y’know, I almost miss it.”

            Giles put down his glass to stare at her.  “But not quite,” Buffy said hastily, raising her palms.  Elisabeth laughed.

            He relaxed, but stared into the distance for a moment.  Then he murmured:  “‘O how I long to travel back And tread again that ancient track!’”

            Buffy could not help but know what he meant; and looking at Elisabeth, she could see that the import was not lost on her either.  “Is that Keats?” Buffy asked him, tentatively.

            “Henry Vaughan,” Elisabeth answered, still looking at him.

            His only response was a blink of acknowledgement to both of them; then he bent to his plate again.

            They finished their meal in a more comfortable silence; moreover, Buffy could see Elisabeth stealing speculative glances at her partner’s profile.  She suddenly saw Rupert Giles as Elisabeth must see him: an appealing mixture of dignity and humility, a prophet’s gaze but a boy’s smile, an honest awareness of himself that Buffy had met in no other man.  Elisabeth turned her eyes back to her plate, and rearranged her napkin on her lap: but Buffy could see the faint warmth that had come into her eyes before she cast them down, and breathed suddenly in relief.

            Celebrating, Buffy lifted her glass of wine and drained it.

 

*

 

They all agreed that it was best to go to bed early.  So, after clearing up from supper and taking each to themselves the tasks of arranging the things they’d brought, they called goodnight to one another, and Buffy went upstairs.  They heard the door of her new bedroom close gently.

            To Rupert’s relief, the house had finally warmed up properly, and the drafts had thinned enough that he fancied he could find their source and stop them.  That, however, was a task for another day; right now, he was going to shower and make for bed.  He left Elisabeth making a last-minute notation on something on her laptop at the dining-table—“You’ll fasten up for the night?” he asked her; “Yes, I will”—and went upstairs himself.

            Elisabeth had left her candle on her nightstand.  He was reassured to see it there; to see that she had neither hidden it nor set it in some more public area of the house.  He changed into pajama bottoms and T-shirt, ran his fingers through his shower-damp hair, and hung up the robe he’d brought, to wear in the morning.  Then he sat down on the bed, on the side that was Elisabeth’s, and reached out a finger to touch his gift to her.

            She liked it, he hoped.

            He heard her come upstairs, and the bathroom door shut.  The shower started, and he sat quietly, listening to the hollow fall of water, a familiar sound in a new place.  He sat listening for the whole length of time it took her to bathe, imbibing the sensation of evening in his house; but when the water shut off, he roused himself and reached for the travel alarm he had brought some days before.

            When Elisabeth came in, robed and warm, he was setting it desultorily.  “What time do you want to get up?” he asked, without looking up.

            Instead of answering, she crossed to him and took the clock out of his hands to put back on the nightstand; then laid both hers along his face and lifted it to kiss him.

            He had been longing for her to do exactly this; but still he pulled away and uttered:  “What—what are you doing?”

            “I was,” she said softly, “making a tacit proposal to take all your clothes off and lay you down.”  He caught the briefest glimpse of her bright eyes before she kissed him again.  Warm, tremulous desire spread through his body; and her hands moving to stroke his damp hair up from the nape drew his exquisite attention.

            Still he broke the kiss again, with an effort, and said:  “Does that mean you forgive me?”

            “Oh, Rupert,” she whispered, with a note in her voice that caught at his breath.  She rocked him gently backward to fall upon the bed; his hands came to rest open at the level of his head either side, and he let her crawl astride of him and resume their kiss.

            But all the same he persisted.  “Is that a yes?” he murmured against her mouth.

            She rose up to look at him.  “Yes, it’s a yes,” she said.  Her hands stroked up the exposed inside of his wrists and pinioned him, her thumbs in the hollows of his palms.  “Now shh.  No more words.”

            This time, when she bent to him, he kissed her back, and with all the generosity she was showing to him.  She was close; she was close, and he wanted her closer.  Her thumbs pressed deeper into his palms, and he drew in a sharp gasp.

            Presently she rose again, breaking their kiss and straddling him more snugly.  His eyes dropped to her hands pulling at the belt-tie of her robe.

            “‘I am naked first, to teach thee,’” she said lightly, as faint of breath as he.  She shrugged out of her robe and shed it behind her, where it brushed his knees and fell to the floor.

            His hands lifted of their own accord to conform to her thighs.  “I thought you said no more words.”

            Her eyes were bright and warm with a mother-cat pleasure, and her soft, pretty mouth curved into a smile as arresting as the curves of her body.

            “I lied,” she said.

 

*

 

Buffy lay in the darkness of her new bedroom waiting drowsily for sleep.  The bed was very comfortable, and the paint smell had almost fully passed.  It was, altogether, an even more pleasing consummation than she had anticipated when this trip had been planned.

            But still she was restless, and sleep would not come.  It had been ages since she patrolled, ages since she had needed to; and she felt the hunting urge tickling at the edges of her consciousness.  Oxford wasn’t on a Hellmouth; that was clear enough; but the wild quiet of the English countryside called to her instincts.

            She gave in, and decided:  she would wait till the night was still enough, and then go down to reconnoiter.

 

*

 

“Took us long enough to get here,” Elisabeth said.

            “Yes,” he answered.  She had given his hands full license to rove, and she shut her eyes in pleasure at the swell of his caress.  “You did shut the door, right?” he murmured.

            She grinned, eyes still closed.  “Yes.”

            “Good,” he said, and rolled them over gently so that he rested upon her.

            Presently:  “Did you bring it?” he said on a breath.

            “You bet your sweet bippy,” she said, and he broke into laughter.

 

*

 

Quietly Buffy got up and dressed, opting for a long-sleeved T-shirt and her warmest exercise trousers.  Carrying her sneakers, she opened the door and crept out into the hall.

            At the bottom of Giles’s and Elisabeth’s door was a very faint light, tremulous and flickering, as of a candle; and she could hear them murmuring faintly on the other side.  It didn’t take a genius to suss what was going on, so Buffy made her way as quickly as possible to the head of the stairs, and down.  As she did so, she heard him laugh: a laugh unlike any she’d heard from him, without a trace of the rectitude that normally clung even to his sense of humor.  Then a soft, voiced gasp from Elisabeth, with a note of accomplishment in it.  She hurried her steps before she could hear any more.

            The front door creaked loudly as she opened it, and though she doubted that they were in a listening-to-noises place, she winced and waited a moment before stepping outside.  She pulled it shut behind her, but opened it again almost immediately when she heard a scratching down low.  The cat trotted out, a black shape against the far-off light at the head of the lane, and disappeared round the corner of the porch.

            It seemed she wasn’t the only one with the idea of a patrol.  Buffy descended the porch steps and settled into a comfortable stride in the direction the cat had gone, her grip sure on the stake in her pocket.

 

*

 

Resting together, they listened to one another’s breathing and watched the tea light sink and gutter in the stand he had given her.  Neither of them moved to put it out; it wasn’t yet clear whether they were finished and ready to go to sleep, and they were, for the moment, languorously comfortable where they lay.

            After a while he moved to nuzzle the nape of her drying hair.  “All right?” he murmured.

            “Mm.” She drew a long breath and turned onto her back; he shifted out of her way and resettled his arm across her.

            “You?” she asked.

            “Never better,” he said, smiling; and she gave a gentle snort.

            After a moment:  “…And you don’t think I’m a puritan?” she said, wistfully.

            He went still, then lifted his head.  “_No_,” he said.  “I was just—”

            “—Because I was going to say,” she went on quietly, “if you do there’s not much I can do about it.”

            “I don’t,” he said firmly.  “It was the nearest stupid weapon to hand.  It was nothing to do with…with reality.”

            In the faint light her eyes were closed, her face calm.  “I thought maybe so,” she said.  “But all the same, you’ll be honest with me, won’t you?  You know something about my family.  You know they’re…they have something to do with puritanical sadism.  I sometimes fear…they’ve passed it on to me.”

            He nestled his face below her ear.  “I know,” he said.  “I will.  I’m sorry.”

            She moved a hand to touch him.  “I know.”

            “I wish I could unsay it.”

            “Nah,” she said.  “It was in the air.  It needed exorcising.”

            Her words, and her tone, released his heart to a buoyant lightness.  “Still,” he said, with energy, “I want to make it up to you.  Put the penitence where it belongs…_mea culpa_—_mea culpa_—_mea maxima culpa_….”  He followed his confessions each with soft kisses down her arm.

            She laughed.  “Rupert, knock that off.”  But she did not resist his caresses, and a few moments later she arched to his touch, and lost her words again.

 

*

 

The wind had dropped, and the clouds scudded high in the sky, pearling where they touched the moon.  Buffy had walked the perimeter of the property, including the wood, and had met nothing wilder than the cat.

            Her thoughts, however, were a thicket of shadow-like worries, creeping without substance enough for her to dispatch them.  She had told him she would think about what he’d said, but the truth was she had been thinking about it long before he said it.  She had her hands full figuring out what a Slayer was, and then she’d gone and changed the definition, without considering what it would do to the definition of him, although she suspected that he had been trying to anticipate and facilitate that change outside her notice.  In all the charges he’d laid at her door he had not, she noticed, finally blamed her for his own bitterness; but she wished he had.  Maybe it would have gotten him over this…hump of self-accusation.

            But then again, maybe not.  This was Giles we were talking about.  Buffy kicked lightly at a tussock of grass, making the cat turn to look briefly at her, fifteen paces ahead.  Maybe Elisabeth was right, and they just had to let him work it out on his own, with as little interference as possible.  Elisabeth was smart; way smarter than she was.  Buffy glanced up at the quarter moon and half-consciously calculated the time between now and the new moon.  Round about Christmas it’d be much darker.  She’d patrol then, too.

            She made her way quietly around the house to the front.  The flickering light in the window of the master bedroom had gone, and the house was dark.  The cat was waiting for her on the doorstep.  She let them both in, shut the door as quietly as she could, peeled off her damp grass-coated sneakers, and crept upstairs.

            All was quiet.  Relaxing, Buffy returned on silent feet to her bedroom.  She stripped off her trousers and crawled into bed, where she fell asleep almost at once.  A few minutes later she was roused briefly by the cat nosing the door open and leaping up to curl warmly at her feet, but soon closed her eyes again; and the house slept.


	9. Dead Secrets

_There is, it seems to us,_

_At best, only a limited value_

_In the knowledge derived from experience._

_The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,_

_For the pattern is new in every moment_

_And every moment is a new and shocking_

_Valuation of all we have been.  We are only undeceived_

_Of that which, deceiving, can no longer harm._

_—_T. S. Eliot_, Four Quartets_

 

_Rupert put the kettle on and stared hard into the marbled pattern of the countertop.  It wasn’t a fluke, then.  The first night, when she had startled him awake by sitting bolt upright in bed, racked with dry sobs, he had decided that the psychic wound, the old wound of being torn from her home, had come to trouble her.  He had comforted her with his hands and his voice, and eased her back to sleep, curled into him and nested in his arms.  In the morning she had waked first in the grey dawn light, and teased him out of sleep with a light finger stroked down the bridge of his nose and over his morning stubble and across the broad curves of his arm; and he had offered her every last ounce of solace in his body, and she had accepted it with a gladness that felt to him as though she’d released it from some inward tether._

_            But whatever had hold of her had not let her go.  She had been quiet and distractable throughout the day, and the following night had slept badly, never settling to one position, twitching, and at last, dreaming.  His hands and voice were not enough, and she had got up finally to open a window and draw in the night air with long gasps._

_            That morning she had sat cold and numbly staring at her breakfast, and then got dressed and went out walking.  He had considered following her, but decided against it: if it could be solved, she would solve it, and if it couldn’t, she would bring it to him in her time._

_            He had been passing through the hall when she came in from the back door, and her look was not of one who had solved her trouble.  If anything, she looked worse: pale, and ill, and pinched under the eyes.  She saw him, and cut her eyes away._

_            Now she was sitting in the drawing room, staring sightlessly out the window with her knees drawn up, and he had passed from perplexity to alarm to a quiet, curdling fear.  He could no longer refrain from investigating: tea seemed the obvious opening, so he waited, with the two cups ready on the counter, for the water to come to the boil._

_Willow_ _ passed him to rummage in the fridge, and paused with the door open.  “I don’t think tea will fix it, Giles,” she said._

_            “It’s not for fixing,” he said quietly, “it’s for investigating.  Has…has she told you anything?”_

_            Willow cast her gaze upward, thinking, but then shook her head._

_            “What do you…what are you—what are you reading on her?”  He pushed the question out, ignoring the breach it had made in his efforts to insulate himself and Willow from raw feeling._

_            She shut the fridge door and drew a slow breath.  Then:  “She’s afraid.”_

_            “Well, obviously,” Rupert said.  “I mean—what—?”_

_            “No; it goes deeper than the obvious,” __Willow__ said quietly.  “I mean, it’s not just that she’s afraid, it’s—there isn’t anything I can read of her that _isn’t_ soaked in fear.  She’s—_afraid_.”_

_            “But…,” he cast caution to the winds, “but—do you know why?”_

_            “No,” _ _Willow_ _ said.  “And I don’t want to, so don’t—”_

_            He put up placating palms.  “I’m not asking.  I’m not asking you to.  I just wanted something to go on.”_

_            “Your water’s boiling,” _ _Willow_ _ said, and as he looked down, silently made her escape._

_He set the cup of tea before Elisabeth on the end table, at enough of a distance that she could refuse it, close enough to be a definite offer.  He took up a seat across from her, in a creaking wicker-backed chair, and lifted his own cup for a patient sip, as much a statement as the original gift._

_            His heart sank: instead of reaching for the tea, she merely turned her miserable gaze upon it and mumbled a protest._

_            “Sorry?” he said, turning an ear to her.  But his mind had caught up and translated her mumble nevertheless.  _Don’t be kind to me.  I can’t bear it_._

_            She shook her head.  “I can’t,” she said._

_            “There’s nothing you have to do,” he said softly._

_            She closed her eyes and shuddered.  “Yes there is,” she said.  “I have to go.  I have to go home.”_

_            She was supposed to have stayed two more days.  “Are you sure?” he said._

_            “I have to go,” she repeated, doggedly.  “I shouldn’t have come.”_

_            He put his tea down in the saucer, then after a hesitation set down the saucer on the coffee table.  “Can’t you tell me?”  He resisted the impulse to run his hands nervously over his thighs, and made them rest upon his knees instead._

_            She shut her eyes again, tighter, and shook her head._

_            “Elisabeth,” he said._

_            “I have to go away,” she said, and this time looked at him.  “I have to go now, before it gets harder.”_

_            “Before what gets harder?”  But he wasn’t sure he wanted to know._

_            “Leaving,” she said, very pale now.  But her expression, looking up at him, was…immovable.  It was the expression that brought the full sense of the word home to him._

_            She let down her feet to the floor, and sat with her small, boyish hands pressed down either side of her seat, as if she had stopped in for an afternoon visit and was drawing the conversation to a close._

_            He frowned, and blinked back up at her face.  “Are you—” He stopped, unwilling to believe his own conclusion.  “Are you attempting to break up with me?”_

_            If anything, her expression closed tighter, but he could feel—he didn’t need to be _ _Willow_ _ to feel—the crying urge of her to cling to him, for a brief but intense moment.  Then she said:  “I’m not attempting it.  I’m doing it.”_

_            “Without even telling me why.”  His gut clamped hard._

_            “You already know.”_

_            “No,” he said, slowly, “I actually don’t.  Enlighten me.”_

_            “It’s because it’s....” She broke off and stirred restlessly to her feet.  “I’m not—I’m not safe.”_

_            He found that he had risen too.  “Of course it’s not safe,” he said.  “I thought that was understood.  I thought you’d accepted the risks.  You of all people ought to understand—”_

_            “No, it’s you who don’t understand.  I said I’m not safe.”  She gestured desperately at her chest.  “I’m not safe, I’m a danger to you.”_

_            “You’ve said this before,” he said, fixing her with a frown.  “It doesn’t seem relevant.”_

_            “That’s why it’s dangerous.  I can’t…,” she stopped to glance around the room as if looking for a last-minute reprieve— “I can’t be with you and know what I know.”_

_            “Then why were you with me at all?” he said, and was startled at the anger in his own voice._

_            For a moment her face lost its resolve; but she recovered, drawing a breath and clasping her hands to her mouth for a moment.  “I’ve thought it all over,” she said, her voice constricted, “and there isn’t any room for me any more.  There was a little room when you came to me, after Buffy died—there was a little room for me then.  I took you in, and got—involved.  But if I wasn’t there—if I wasn’t there somebody else would have saved you.  But you don’t see—with what’s coming—it won’t be like that anymore.  I can’t afford to be important.”_

_            “It’s a bit late for that,” Rupert said, dryly._

_            “I can’t fix it,” she said, her voice hard again, “but I can stop it.  I can go away, and I can stay away.”_

_            “That seems in keeping with your usual policy,” he said._

_            She reddened.  “You don’t understand how bad it’s going to be,” she said.  “You don’t know—the scope of it.  It’s not just about Sunnydale anymore.”_

_            “No,” he said, “that is something I do know—or why are we in _ _England_ _?  And why would you throw aside what we have—the trust that we have—in the face of whatever evil is rising?  We need all that we have; and we have something.  Can you deny it?”  He stopped to look her hard in the face.  “Can you?”_

_            “No,” she whispered._

_            For a moment their triumph before the Council, their buoyant trust in one another, the certainty of partnership that had filled him with such delight and gratitude, lay open between them, in all its wonder.  With her, he would not fear blindness._

_            “Then fight with me,” he said, with a soft intensity he hadn’t felt since he couldn’t remember when.  “Fight alongside me.”_

_            She looked him dead in the eye and said:  “No.”_

 

*

 

_O Sapientia_

 

A strong, chasing wind cleared the sky over Pyke’s Lea, then moved in fresh clouds to bank the horizons.  Buffy and Giles moved in and out of the house, carrying tarps and sanding equipment and painting paraphernalia to various destinations; Elisabeth took up a position at the kitchen table with her laptop and gathered to herself a nest of books and papers nearly as impressive as the one at her desk in the Oxford flat.  She sat, a close-eyed gaze on the screen whether her hands were moving or not, her legs tucked up under her tailor-fashion, a perennial cup of tea cooling at her elbow.  It was she who jumped at opportunities to go out for groceries or retrieve the odd item from the flat; more than once Buffy saw her pause on the brick walk on the way out to the car, and draw in a long breath of the chill air.  That her escape had to do with more than just her thesis, Buffy knew by the fact that the one time Giles was present at her departure, on his knees in the walk planting solar-powered foot-lights along the way, Elisabeth had been relentlessly cheerful and solicitous to inquire if he needed anything.

            He didn’t.

            That evening, while Giles was cooking and Elisabeth was in the bathroom, the shower a ghostly noise in the falling night, Buffy got up her nerve and called Dawn.

            “_Finally_,” she said.  “We were beginning to wonder if you’d died up there.”

            “Not funny,” Buffy said.  “Anyway, I’m fine.  It just took a while to adjust.”

            “Having fun?” Dawn inquired.

            “Uh…I’m not sure ‘fun’ is the word I’d use—as I told you before.”  Buffy pushed her bedroom door further closed and sat down on her bed.  “It’s been kinda rough.  But I’m hoping things are smoothing out now.”

            “Did you and Giles fight?” Dawn asked, and Buffy rolled her eyes at her sister’s blunt inquisitory methods.

            “What do you think?” she said.  “We also got drunk and woke up in the same bed.”

            “Not funny,” Dawn said.

            “It’s true.”  Having regained equal footing, Buffy gave Dawn an expurgated version of their burst of free speech and the scotchfest that followed (the latter had grown rather shadowy in her memory).  She found herself, to her private disquiet, omitting the information of Spike’s mysterious resurrection—not that that was difficult, as Spike had seemed to serve merely as the spark to a keg of gasoline rather than forming much of the substance of their conflict itself.  Dawn didn’t need to know Spike was back.  It would only inspire needless freakage.  And wasn’t that why Giles had kept his silence?  Buffy sighed to herself.  If she didn’t want to be a total hypocrite, she had to acknowledge that Dawn had a right to know.

            But she couldn’t bring herself to say it.

            It was with relief that she welcomed Dawn’s offer to hand her off to Willow.

            “Hey,” Willow said.  “Glad you decided not to be a stranger.”

            “All right, all right.  I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier, okay?”

            “We figured it must mean really bad news or really good news.”

            “Well…it’s kinda both.  The good news is, Giles and I got drunk.”

            “…Oh,” Willow said.

            “The bad news is, he’s not doing very well, and he actually admitted it.”

            “No kidding.  I can feel his vibes from here.”

            “And…you were right about him and Elisabeth.”

            “How are _they_ doing?”

            Buffy leaned back against her pillow and sighed.  “I think they’re doing better than they _were_.  And we’re all in the house now, so they’re not separated any more.”

            “That…sounds monumentally not convincing, Buffy.”

            “I know,” Buffy sighed again.  “It’s just that she’s…haunted.  And he’s—Will, he’s not just on a guilt trip, he’s on like a guilt _quest_.”

            “That sounds like Giles,” Willow said ruefully.

            “They do a lot of fighting without fighting,” Buffy said.

            Willow sighed.  “I’ve done that kind of fighting.”

            “Me too.”

            “But I’m guessing that’s not the kind of fighting you’ve been doing with him.”

            “No.”  Buffy told Willow the same story she had told Dawn, leaving out the Spike parts again.  What was the matter with her?  Perhaps she wanted to digest the whole Spike-being-alive-somewhere thing before her friends and family all jumped in with their judgments.  And, Giles’s fears to the contrary, she felt no desire to go looking for him—especially if he was with Angel.  So that wasn’t a factor.

            No, it just wasn’t something she wanted to discuss with anyone—or have flying around in discussion round her ears.  She could imagine the stuff Xander would say not quite out of her electronic earshot; and _Andrew_.  God.  What kind of myth would he Joseph-Campbell this Spike thing into?  She seemed to be quibbling less and less with Giles’s decision, if decision it was, which that was still kind of in doubt.  Giles seemed constitutionally unable to make any decisions at all, except to keep doggedly working on his house.

            When was silence the same thing as duplicity?

            The question niggled at her as she made plans with Willow to pick up Andrew from the airport—Giles would take him to London tomorrow afternoon and see him onto the plane.

            “Buffy,” came Giles’s voice thinly from below.  “Dinner.”

            “I gotta go,” Buffy said.  “I’ll call you later.”

            “You better,” Willow said.

 

*

 

_O Adonai_

 

“I’ll see you later,” Giles said, straightening the lapels of his leather jacket and slinging a scarf round his neck.  “Here’s hoping it won’t take all afternoon.”

            “Drive safe,” Elisabeth said, kissing his cheek.  Buffy waved.

Buffy didn’t really need confirmation of Elisabeth’s state of mind, but the moment Giles shut the front door and they heard his footsteps crunching down the front walk to the car, Buffy could see Elisabeth draw the first relaxed breath of the day.

            “Well,” she said, with a wry glance in Buffy’s direction, “you’ll have to put up with my cooking today.  I doubt he’ll get Andrew through Heathrow before dinnertime.”  Cheerfully, she went into the kitchen and started opening cabinets, pushing out her lips and clucking to herself.

            “Can I help?”

            Elisabeth opened her mouth, a clear refusal on her lips, but apparently changed her mind.  “Sure.  What would you like to eat?”

            Buffy joined her at the open cabinet and studied its contents dubiously.  Their M.O. for the last few days had been to make small grocery trips for the main meals of the day; Giles and Elisabeth both had put off the task of laying in supplies for Christmas Day, and the cabinets were half-filled with random things—a packet of coffee here, a tin of hot cereal there, noodles, cans of tuna for the cat. 

            In the end they decided on tuna casserole, spiced with rosemary from the herb garden.  The cat sat in the kitchen doorway and looked at them silently, twitching his tail curled around his feet.  “We’re going shopping for Christmas stuff tomorrow; you won’t be out of tuna for long,” Elisabeth told him.

            “What are we having for Christmas?” Buffy asked.

            “Oh,” Elisabeth said, with an artless sigh, “I didn’t want to make Rupert cook a whole turkey, so I suggested we get a roast.  Other than that, we haven’t really planned the menu.  I want to get some wine for mulling, and some cider, and some oranges, and milk and cream to make eggnog.  Not to mention the tea.”  She opened the cupboard and pulled out two teacups with their saucers.  “Remind me to bring the latte cups out from the flat; they’ll do well for the mulled wine.”

            “You certainly aren’t lacking in teacups,” Buffy observed, looking at the congregation of mugs on the bottom shelf, and the matching service on the second shelf from which Elisabeth had drawn.

            Elisabeth snorted.  “I think the missing socks in the dryer transmogrify into mugs and reappear in cabinets.”

            Buffy laughed.

 

*

 

Without Giles in the house, the day moved quietly, without a snag in the surface of the current of passing sunlight.  Elisabeth, having laid out their two places for tea on the kitchen table, retired into the dining room and her nest of books, leaving Buffy to wander or work as she chose.

            Buffy chose to wander.  She had made patrols of the outside perimeter, but she had not yet explored the house without the weight of Giles’s anxious gaze upon her.  She felt guilty of a vague treachery for being relieved at getting rid of him for a few hours, but guilt made the relief no less real.  She was beginning to understand Elisabeth’s air of attempting to make amends for something; it must be wearing to love someone and be relieved whenever they went away.

            But it was Giles’s own fault, dammit.  Why couldn’t he do something straightforward about his crisis, like…get turned into a Fyarl demon?  For the first time in her life Buffy wished for the convenient antagonism of Ethan Rayne.  But _no_, she told herself, you do _not_ want that.

            Even though it meant Giles had nothing to fight but shadows.

            Buffy found that her wandering steps had taken her to the study.  Over lunch her first day here, Elisabeth had described their battle with her ancestor’s ghost, which had taken place in this room, with Brian eagerly putting in to describe his experience of being possessed.  There had been flitting shadows, glamors of the house burning, defiling breezes.  Glancing around the study, Buffy saw no trace of any of these things; the house had ceased to be malignant as completely as Giles had been consumed by his own haunting.

            But the room still had an air of reticence, as if it had despaired of ever being heard and had now drawn into itself.  Upon the ceiling were figures and designs obscured by years of dust and ash and grease; the old dim mirror over the fireplace reflected its surroundings with a faint reluctance, as if it would rather be looking inward.

            Buffy shook her head.  It was weird to use her peripheral senses for something other than danger.

            Suddenly a shadow flickered among the bookshelves.  Buffy jumped and stifled a yelp.  “Oh—it’s you,” she said to the cat, who was uncurling himself from one of the shelves and jumping to the floor.  “You getting used to this place?”

            For answer the cat lifted his tail into a high curve and sauntered out of the room as if he had lived there for years.

            Of them all, Buffy reflected as she left the room to wander elsewhere, the cat seemed least unnerved by the shadows of dead secrets.

 

*

 

It was while they were washing up all the dishes of the day, the sunset fast fading out the windows of the kitchen, that Buffy nerved herself up to ask.

            “Rupert’s not back yet,” Elisabeth said, pausing with her hands in the soapy water to glance out the diamond panes at the deepening night. 

Buffy looked in the same direction briefly, her hands in a dishtowel held out to receive the next dish.  “No,” she said.  “He—” She stopped.

            Elisabeth glanced at her before reaching for another dish.  “Yes?”

            Buffy had been impatient with Giles’s attitude toward Elisabeth, one moment acting as if she could crush him if he didn’t act first, and the next treating her like eggshell porcelain.  She didn’t look like either extreme to Buffy; but misgiving, like the misgiving that had seized her tongue on the phone with Dawn, choked her silent.

            “What?” Elisabeth said.  “Did he say something?”

            “A lot of somethings,” Buffy said.  “He—that one day—he said he’d made all these sacrifices and only had being irrelevant to show for it.”

            Elisabeth sighed and handed the rinsed dish to Buffy, who dried it mechanically, then laid it on the towel on the counter with the others.  “He must have been pretty embittered,” Elisabeth said, “to actually say that.”

            “Well,” Buffy said uncomfortably, “it kinda started when I got mad at him for not telling me Spike was alive.”

            “Ah,” Elisabeth breathed, and reached into the water again; but then she paused.  “But I thought he _had_ told you.  Didn’t he, a few months ago?”

            “He didn’t get coherent enough to actually get around to telling me, if he meant to,” Buffy said dryly.

            Elisabeth gave another deep sigh and raised a pan from the water to scrub.

            “He said he found it out from you,” Buffy said, her face heating.  This was what she’d been aiming to ask, and she still didn’t know how Elisabeth would take it.

            At first she gave no answer, scrubbing minutely at the pan’s surface.  Then she said:  “I take it you don’t have much of an inside track on what’s going on with Angel.”

            “No,” Buffy said bluntly.  “And I don’t like working blind.”

            “No one does,” Elisabeth said, her voice almost lost in the sound of the running water.

            “Giles says you don’t know anything after Spike showed up at Wolfram &amp; Hart.”

            “That was the last I saw,” Elisabeth said, shrugging as she dipped the pan in the water again.  Then she glanced Buffy’s way.  “And you really didn’t know?”

            Buffy resisted the urge to cross her arms and settled for chafing one arm with an idle hand, the towel tucked over her wrist.  She shook her head.

            Elisabeth stopped and fixed Buffy with a steady gaze.  “Well,” she said gravely, “are you okay?”

            Nobody had asked her that in forever.  Well, to be accurate, nobody had asked her that intending to trust her answer.  Instead of taking refuge in meltdown (and the cry of pain did go up inside her before she could squelch it), she gave her answer a moment of serious thought.

            “Yeah,” she said finally.  “Yeah, I am.”  She sighed.  “It kinda wigs me a little.”

            “I can imagine.”  Elisabeth turned back to scrubbing, rinsed the pan in and out, and passed it to her.

            “I think Giles was freaked that I might—I don’t know—drop everything and go find Spike.  But—I—that’s not—”  She stopped, at a loss for the right words.  “It’s like, Giles and I can’t even say the word ‘Spike’ without it ending in mushroom clouds and nuclear winters.”

            A faint smile touched Elisabeth’s lips as she ran the dishrag over a plate in a slow circle; then it dissolved into a sober look.  “Maybe,” she said, “you guys fight about Spike because you can’t fight about Angel.”

            Buffy had a brief vision of Giles’s eyes, dark with anger, and his trembling scarred fingers.  “Yeah,” she heard herself say.  The vision cleared, and she looked over at Elisabeth, who was giving the plate a serious going-over.  “And you guys fight about housekeeping and scotch when you ought to be—” she took a breath and pushed it out— “when you ought to be fighting about what happened with the First.”

            Elisabeth’s eyes shut for a brief moment; but she shook her head.  “No; not about that.  That’s not what’s on the table.”

            “Well, of course it isn’t,” Buffy said.  “You—”

            But Elisabeth still shook her head.  “_My_ problem is the First.  _His_ problem is that I left him.”

            “And so,” Buffy said slowly, trying to understand, “he doesn’t trust you?”

            She raised her head and stared into the distance before her; and for a moment her face was taut with the same bleak, tearless expression Buffy had seen before.  But she shook it off and rinsed the plate briskly.  “It’ll solve itself—unless it doesn’t.  It’s such a nuisance.”  She handed Buffy the wet plate and plunged her hands back into the suds.  “‘For it is the very mark of Eros that when he is in us we had rather share unhappiness with the Beloved than be happy on any other terms.’”  Buffy recognized Elisabeth’s ironic style of quotation, but before she could respond, Elisabeth frowned down into the clearing layer of bubbles.  “Looks like that’s all of them.”  She drew the stopper and reached for the towel over her shoulder, leaving the water to suck noisily down.  “I think I want a cup of tea.  You?”

            Buffy grimaced.  “I’m not all that big on tea, to tell you the truth.”

            “Cocoa, then?”

            “We have some?”

            “Yeah—I think I—” She opened a cupboard. “Yes, I did bring it.”

            As Elisabeth was setting the kettle to the stove, they heard the crunch of tires in the lane and saw the swift sparkle of the headlights in the diamond panes.

            “Rupert’s home,” Elisabeth breathed.  She looked relieved, and again Buffy reflected on what it would be like to be relieved both coming and going.

            They heard his footsteps on the walk; presently the door opened and he set his keys with a small jingle on the little table in the foyer.  A moment later he appeared in the kitchen doorway, unwinding the scarf from his neck.

            “You’ve missed dinner,” Elisabeth said, pulling out a third cup to set alongside their two, “but there are leftovers in the fridge.  Want some tea?”

            “Oh, God,” was all Giles said.  He pulled a chair out from the kitchen table and dropped slowly into it, reaching up hands to massage his temples. 

“I’ve got a splitting headache,” he said after a moment.  “Andrew asks more questions than I can keep up with, let alone answer.  How many total Slayers we’ve found, what Xander said in his last report, whether he could make a form on the computer to organize the information in the files, the relative proportions of American and European cars, whether there’s a difference between fruitcake and Christmas cake—”

            Buffy snorted a laugh.

            “Did you answer him that you are what you eat?” Elisabeth grinned.

            Giles merely grunted.

            Quietly, Elisabeth plucked the kettle off the boil and poured his tea first.  As Buffy watched, she set it before him with gentle eyes, and turned away to pour her own tea and Buffy’s instant cocoa.  As she passed Buffy her mug and a spoon, Buffy could see the shadow of the bereaved look behind her soft gaze.  But only because she was looking for it.

 

*

 

_O radix Jesse_

 

On Friday they all went into Oxford to do their Christmas shopping.  Buffy had watched Elisabeth pick out presents for Giles and Brian her first day here, so she knew what they were getting; but she had not picked out any presents herself.  When they reached a promising row of shops, they paused.  Giles melted away to do some shopping of his own; Elisabeth waited, quietly distracted, until a familiar voice hailed them.

            “_There_ you are.”  Hands in pockets, Brian greeted them with a slouching sidelong smile.

            “I was about to say the same thing,” Elisabeth said, grinning comfortably.

            “Get your shopping done?”

            “No, we just started.  Get yours done?”

            Brian snorted.  “No.”

            “You still coming out for Christmas?”

            “I dunno, what kind of eats will there be?  No, seriously, of course I’m coming out.  But I don’t know when I’ll make it out there exactly; I’ve got to put in an appearance at my parents’ house Christmas Eve, or they’ll be moderately put out.  I can only get away with staying away altogether once every two years or so.”

            Elisabeth gave him a dry pointed look.  “You’ll have to take me to meet them sometime.”

            Brian groaned.  “I know, but I just hate the image I’m getting of my mum saying, ‘And is this your young lady?’” He put all his fingers to his forehead, as if to push the image out of his brain.  “She’s said that about every woman I even _mention_ to her.  ‘It’s about time you thought about settling down, Brian.’”

            Elisabeth snorted into a laugh; Buffy felt her lips quirking into a smile.

            “So: have you bought my present yet?”

            “Ye-es,” Elisabeth said.

            “Well, can’t I have a clue?”

            “It’s about the size of a breadbox.  Have you got mine?”

            “No,” Brian said.

            “Good.”  Buffy cut briskly into their banter.  “Then you can help me.”  Impulsively, she hooked a hand through Brian’s arm and pulled him along the pavement.  She glanced back to catch Elisabeth openly laughing at them, and Brian casting back at her a look of mock alarm.

            “So,” she said, when she’d got him at a sufficient distance, “I don’t know what you’re planning to get Elisabeth, but I am going to hit the boutiques.”

            “For what; d’you know?”  She had let go of him and he settled into a comfortable stride next to her, hands back in his pockets.

            “I’m thinking,” Buffy said, with a secret smile, “I want to get her a pair of nice pajamas.” She turned to him.  “Do you happen to know what she likes?”

            Brian thought.  “Well, if you’re planning to give her something she’ll actually wear, don’t go for the glam.  I mean, she complains about satin and sequins and elaborate stitching and stuff in her outdoor clothes.  Get her something in natural fabric, but really well-made.”

            “Cool,” Buffy said.  This tallied with her own assessment of Elisabeth’s tastes.  “What about you?”

            Brian grimaced.  “I dunno,” he said.  “I’m not very good at choosing gifts.  Maybe you can help me.  Maybe you can help me choose something for Rupert.  I suppose I’ll have to give the blighter a gift.”

            “Elisabeth said you don’t like Giles.”

            “I don’t,” Brian said bluntly.  “But I suppose I’m getting used to him.  He does have a way of—I don’t know—balance, competence—that has its own charm.”

            Buffy was unused to hearing someone evaluate Giles without the intruding awareness of Giles as an alien or—a geek.  Brian was a geek, and not all that removed from Watchery geekiness, either, as far as books went.  Raveling the thread, she murmured aloud:  “I used to think all geeks everywhere had a secret handshake, but it turns out they really don’t.”  She felt Brian looking at her as he stopped, and it came over her what she’d just said.  She grimaced at him, and tried to temporize:  “I mean—you know, ‘geek’ is such a relative term—”

            Brian snorted, but he looked amused.  He stepped back and pulled open the door to a promising shop.  “After you,” he said, with a very English gesture of the hand.

 

*

 

_O clavis David_

 

On Saturday Giles got up early and went out without saying where he was going.  He returned a few hours later with a trunkful of greenery and a big roll of what looked like kite string.  Buffy stood with Elisabeth out on the front walk, shivering in one of Elisabeth’s cardigan sweaters, and watched him load his arms piece by piece with rich greens.  “There’s lots of it here,” he said with a faint smile.  “You could bear a hand, you know.”

            “But what is it?” Buffy asked, following Elisabeth willingly out onto the gravel of the drive.

            “They’re greens,” Giles said, magnificently stating the obvious.

            “For the hanging of the greens,” Elisabeth explained from behind him, reaching into the trunk for an armful.

            “It’s called getting into the Christmas spirit,” Giles said, tossing the roll of string lightly in his hand and starting up the walk.

            “It’s _Advent_,” Elisabeth called after him.

            He turned to smirk back at her on his way in the door, where the cat stood peering out with inquisitive whiskers.  “The Advent spirit, then,” he said, and disappeared.

            She smirked back, briefly, and gathered together her load of fir and juniper.

 

*

 

The hanging of the greens turned out to involve tacking up a length of string along the main hall and over the study door, pulling it taut and securing it, and then tucking the branches Giles had brought behind it, pulling bits downward to conceal the string and the bare chopped ends.  The result was quite artistic (Elisabeth dragged over the ladder to tie on blue ribbon at intervals), and they all stood back to admire it as the scent of evergreen woods began to tinge the air.

            Giles had also brought home a number of strings of white Christmas lights—“fairy lights,” he called them, and Buffy thought _They don’t look that gay to me_, and would have said it if Giles hadn’t given her a narrow glare daring her to.

            After dinner, with the larder full to bursting with all the groceries they’d bought yesterday, Elisabeth declared she was going to make cookies.  Buffy, torn between the tempting delights of assisting in the kitchen with doughy goodness and Giles’s obvious need of her help putting up the lights, got Elisabeth to promise to call her when it was time to get out the cookie cutters and make the frosting.  She left Elisabeth humming as she got out ingredients and flipped to the right page in the cookbook, a candle burning on the kitchen table.

            Buffy and Giles did not speak much except to debate the logistics of stringing lights and the virtues of various windows, but unlike the silence of her first arrival, this was a peaceful reticence.  Buffy convinced him that it would be a good idea to drape two strings crossing one another in the foyer and, when Christmas came, hang ornaments on them.  “You get to climb the ladder then,” he said good-naturedly, handing her one roll of lights and the staple gun.

            “You’ll see,” she said to him a few minutes later from atop the ladder.  “It’ll be cheerful and welcoming for when we have guests.”

            “What guests?”

            She looked down at him where he held the ladder steady.  “Well, Brian’s coming Christmas Day.  You knew that, right?”

            Giles rolled his eyes.  “Oh right.  I forgot.  Actually, Elisabeth said she was going to invite Anne as well.  The vicar of her church,” he explained.

            “Yeah, Elisabeth mentioned her.”  Buffy turned to inch the string of lights up the wall.  “This a good angle?”

            She glanced down to see him gazing past her at the lights above her head, his eyes behind his glasses wide and dark.  She suddenly felt an upwelling of affection for him, for his untucked flannel shirt and jeans and slipper socks, for his competent male hands gripping the ladder, his incisive gaze and ineffable humor.

            “Yes,” he said, “I think that will do.”

            Buffy plied the staple gun (carefully, so as to trap the wires and not pierce them), and dismounted the ladder so they could move it across the foyer.

            In the kitchen they heard the mixer going (Giles had purchased a stand mixer for the house yesterday, prompting Elisabeth to fling spontaneous arms around him and kiss him, which sparked a diffident smile to his face), the rhythm of the motor mixed with Elisabeth’s humming.  Occasionally the motor stopped and the wandering tune she was humming was left alone for a snatch before the mixer started again.

            As they were working on the second strand of lights, the mixer stopped for a protracted time, and Elisabeth’s humming gave way to outright song, a song Buffy recognized.

            _O come, O come Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel,_

_            That mourns in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appear._

_            Rejoice! rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, O _ _Israel_ _._

The words, and Elisabeth’s thin sweet voice, seemed to gather into themselves all the strayed feelings of wandering and longing, and some nameless ache, that Buffy had walked through and seen and felt since she had come here.  For a moment a shadow of tears lodged itself under her tongue; but she swallowed it.  After a moment she glanced at Giles to see if he’d noticed, and saw him gazing into the middle distance, preoccupied by his own thoughts.  Feeling her eyes upon him, he stirred and helped her to move the ladder once more.

            They did not pause in their peaceful effort to get the lights strung in the hall and in the study; and Elisabeth’s voice followed them as they went, happy and aching at the same time, singing the verses as prayers.

            _O come, thou Key of David, come and open wide our heavenly home;_

_            Make safe the way that leads on high, and close the path to misery._

_            Rejoice! rejoice, Emmanuel shall come to thee, O _ _Israel_ _._

The cat came to watch them when they reached the study.  The study, Buffy noted, appeared to be the cat’s favorite haunt in the house, save at night when he curled up at the foot of her bed.

            As they strung lights over the French doors in the study, Buffy heard Giles absently harmonizing with the faint verses coming from the kitchen.  When at last they stepped back from their handiwork, Buffy refrained from the inane sentence of satisfaction that rose to her lips, and let Giles keep his silence.  Elisabeth had gone through all the verses of “O Come O Come Emmanuel” and was now singing broken snatches of it as she opened and shut cabinets.  At last she called:  “Buffy!  I’m fixing to make the frosting now.”

            “It looks good, doesn’t it?” Giles said, turning a shy smile to her at his side.

            Buffy grinned gently at him and went off to help Elisabeth with the frosting.

 

*

 

_O Oriens—Solstice_

 

The morning sky over Pyke’s Lea was overcast, and the wind whipped impatiently through the barren orchard, when Elisabeth stepped out, dressed for church, the car keys in a gloved hand.  The wind tore a tendril of hair from her bun as she was unlocking the door, and she shoved it back impatiently.

            This was the drawback to living out at Pyke’s Lea, of course: that one couldn’t just pop out the door and walk a few blocks.  On the other hand, if one wanted a nice space of decompression between one thing and the next, a short drive from house to flat, or flat to house, would answer pretty well.

            Not that it was exactly working.  Elisabeth parked across from her flat and got out to walk briskly down the street to the Bridge, smoothing the place on her hair where the tendril had escaped.  The trouble was, there was nowhere for her to be that felt right, that felt safe.  _No safe places_, she had said to Rupert, but she had lied: could there be no such thing as a safe place if every drive in her body was continually looking for one?  Could there be such a thing as a place which wasn’t crawling with threat, both from outside—and, more imperatively—from within?  If it existed, Elisabeth ached for it.

            Even the church, Elisabeth reflected as she made the turn onto its street, was not the sanctuary of legend, in spite of—no, because of—the fact that the priest was her friend.  How could she bear the shame of breaking down to admit that she was failing at—everything she was trying to do?

            But although the church was not a complete sanctuary, it was a place of refreshing.  Elisabeth closed her eyes and let the presence of candlelight and music and readings wash over her, wash her clean for a short while of worry.

            _You have fed them with the bread of tears; you have given them bowls of tears to drink._  Elisabeth opened her eyes briefly.  That was certainly true.  She let them fall shut again, but opened them to rise for the Gospel.

            It was the Visitation.  Anne read the words in a ringing voice—_Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb!_—and Elisabeth was snatched back to the memory of Anne’s fingers drawing the icon that became her birthday present: prophecy, and joy in this new thing—_and it is marvelous in our eyes_—

            She hadn’t yet found a place to hang the icon.  She and Rupert had talked of making the corner upstairs room an office for her, a room for her reading and working—and possibly praying; but what with the Plumbing Disaster and the upheavals of making ready for Buffy’s arrival, they had not talked of it in a long while.  Meanwhile, the icon lay in the flat, rewrapped carefully in its brown paper and put away.

            Elisabeth could feel Anne’s gaze on her: she was preaching now about the Gospel reading.  “God says, ‘See, I am doing a new thing,’ and the prophet says, ‘his origin is from old, from ancient days.’  Salvation is always new, though it is as ancient as time itself.  We long for it, yet it always takes us by surprise.”  Elisabeth could not look up, but she carried the words within and let them comfort her.  Just as quietly, she went forward for communion, and though her conscience had been stirred, she breathed easier as the service ended.

            She would much rather have simply slipped out without greeting Anne, but she had not yet given her invitation.  At the door Anne took her hand, which she gave readily.  “Good morning.”

            “Good morning.”  Elisabeth hesitated, but then plunged on.  “If you haven’t any plans for Christmas afternoon, we want to have you out to the house for dinner.  I meant to call you earlier, but it got away from me.”  This was a light fib, but unavoidable unless she wanted to blurt her shame out before God and everybody.

            But Anne’s face brightened.  “I’d love to come out to Pyke’s Lea for Christmas.  What time is dinner?”

            “Oh, I don’t know yet, but if you can make it out by one or one-thirty—”

            “I’ll make a note of it.  How are you doing?  Are you all right?”  They were casual words, but the priest’s gaze was more than usually focused on her face.

            “Oh, I’m just fine,” Elisabeth heard herself say.  “I’ll catch you later—”  And she ducked away from Anne’s faint frown of concern and escaped down the steps and onto the street.

            Her plan was to pick up the car and drive right back home.  But when she reached her street, she found herself going up to the door of her flat and letting herself quietly inside.

            Without the daily presence of anyone, the flat had a dark, hastily-abandoned look, like the erstwhile residence of refugees—which, Elisabeth reflected, they were, more or less.  She moved slowly through the rooms till she came to her sock drawer in the bedroom.  She drew it open: the icon in its wrappings was still there.  Without taking it out of the drawer, she gently folded back the paper to look at her gift and trace its outlines.

            “Oh, God…,” she whispered aloud.  But she could think of nothing more to say.  Gently she refolded the paper, shut the drawer, and went resolutely back to Pyke’s Lea.

 

*

 

“There’s going to be a Christmas Eve night service at St. John’s,” Elisabeth said to Buffy and Rupert at the dinner table.  “I think I’m going to go.  Would either of you like to come?”

            Buffy glanced dubiously at Rupert, but Rupert was looking at Elisabeth.  Presently he smiled gently.  “I think I’d like that.  I’ll come.”  He turned to Buffy.  Buffy looked at Elisabeth.

            “They won’t try to save my soul, will they?”

            “No,” Elisabeth said, with a sympathetic smile.

            “Buffy,” Rupert said at the same time, “it’s an _Anglican_ church.”

            Buffy twisted her mouth and thought it over.  Finally:  “Okay.  I’ll come.”

            Elisabeth relaxed.  “Thank you.  And then we can come back here and drink festive drinks.”  Buffy gave her a dark look and Elisabeth elaborated, “Hot tea and cider and eggnog and mulled wine.  Any or all of them.”

            “I make a pretty wicked eggnog,” Rupert observed, giving his plate an arch little smile, “if I say it myself.”

            “I’ll bet you do,” Buffy said dryly.

            Elisabeth allowed herself a quiet snicker, and dinner continued in peace.

 

*

 

_O rex gentium_

 

Rupert sat down desultorily to his desk in the study, which was bare and lonely except for the desktop computer Willow had talked him into buying.  Though why it was called a _desktop_ when its main workings lived _under_ the desk, he could not fathom.  He glared at his computer for a moment, then turned to open a manila file and ignore it.

            Willow had said that her work helping to find Slayers was like patiently untangling a necklace snarled in hopeless knots.  The image was a far cry from his neat notations, line by line, of Slayers, their families, their locations, their circumstances.  Most importantly, their names.  Rupert knew that the reason the Council’s records had emphasized the Slayer’s role over her name in their records was partially to protect the girls from spies and evil magicks; so much could be done with a name.

            On the other hand, the names of these young women cut no closer to their actual identities than a description of their role in supernatural warfare.  They were just names, conjuring nothing of their reality than a vague sense of possible skin color and a less vague sense of their language.  They didn’t have the reality that Buffy, upstairs less than fifty feet away, cleaning up the back corner room with Elisabeth, had; they didn’t, to him, have a recognizable habitual expression, or a memorable style of gestures, or a solid but evolving philosophy of battle.

            He didn’t love them.

            It seemed to him that love had always been more important to him than stark responsibility.  He had been taught to be ashamed of this, but the fact was that the Council had depended on his makeup being exactly the way it was.  He had long since ceased to resent it, simply because he couldn’t spare the energy; but staring at his files now, he saw clearly what had happened over the centuries, and was filled with a revolted compassion.

            He couldn’t do what they’d done.  He couldn’t give himself up to cold strategy, couldn’t be a one-man Council wielding a knowledge far more egregiously phallic than the Slayer’s stake.

            The trouble was, he couldn’t be who he used to be either.

            He could walk away.  But he’d tried that.  Hell, Elisabeth had tried it, and she wasn’t even a Watcher.  He remembered suddenly something that had lodged in his brain from Andrew’s natterings in the car: something about Frodo the Nine-Fingered and the ship West.  He shook his head, to clear it.  This kind of maundering was useless.  He ought to get back to work.

            Above him, he heard the scrapes and bumps of Buffy and Elisabeth’s progress on her chosen room upstairs.  It ought to have been a reassuring sound, but Rupert found that it only depressed him further.  He had passed up the opportunity to help them with the project, and he ought to have been there, taking part in Elisabeth’s nesting as she had taken part in his; but he felt disqualified out of hand from any role in creating comfort and security for her.  And, to his disgust, he felt a faint and unreasonable resentment—at her? yes, shamefully, at her—for the fact.  He had to get round that somehow; he had to, or all he’d worked for would slip through his fingers.

            He got up restlessly, and went to raid the tin of Christmas cookies.

 

*

 

“Well,” Elisabeth said, “that looks good.  I’m beat.”

            She rested against the doorjamb of the room that used to be for random storage, and caught her breath.  She was sweating and coated with dust, but Buffy was (of course) still quite fresh and unruffled, gazing at their handiwork with gentle fists on hips.

            “So where do you think you’ll put your desk?” she said.

            Elisabeth screwed up her lips and thought.  “It’s hard to tell,” she said.  “I’ve got this Wild Bill Hickok thing, and it’s virtually impossible to place a desk in here that won’t put me with my back to the door, or force me to face it too closely.  What I think I’ll do is get a desk that is meant to face out from the wall, and put it across from the bookshelves here.”  She gestured from the built-in bookshelves on the inner wall to what would have been the southern outer wall if the roof hadn’t sloped further to accommodate the single-story study below.  One comfortably low window faced east, which would make for glorious light-filled mornings.  Elisabeth had already chosen with her eyes a place on the western wall where the icon would greet the dawn.

            “I’m with you on Wild Bill,” Buffy said.  “It’s a good policy to have.”

            Elisabeth nodded absently.  It was going to be a good room, she thought.  But the full aura of her claim hadn’t permeated it yet.  It was hard not to be impatient: she had a—quite ridiculous—sense of the gangway lifting on a noble ship, and she had to hurry before it’d cast off without her.

            “What I need,” she said aloud, “is a cold drink and a shower.”

 

*

 

“So what d’you think?” Buffy asked the cat as she combed out her wet hair in her room.  “You think the coast is clear?”

            It seemed to her that the house felt a little less lonely and neglected now that they were living in it; its creaks and ancient groans were slowly thawing into friendliness, and the greens and fairy lights looked like they belonged, like a new and flattering outfit.  Buffy had spent the rest of the afternoon before dinner wrapping Christmas presents and listening to Giles’s and Elisabeth’s voices in the kitchen downstairs.  When she had finished she went downstairs to find them kissing quietly in front of the stove, a very domestic scene indeed.

            But by the same token, the house’s new responsiveness to its inhabitants had resulted in an uneasy peace: it suddenly mattered much more that they all ran the gauntlet of grief without crashing into disaster.

            The cat said nothing, merely blinked at her, reclining on her bed with one forepaw tucked under, like a black lamb.

            “Guess you’re not much on telling the future either,” she said, with a dry grin.

            She twisted her wet hair into a knot and secured it, then pulled back the covers of her bed almost to where the cat lay.  “No patrol tonight,” she yawned.  “I’m exhausted.”  She insinuated herself into the bed, and eventually the cat got the hint and got to his feet, stretching, so that she could get under the covers.

            Buffy turned out the light and settled down to sleep.

 

*

 

_O Emmanuel_

 

The house was quiet; not the preternatural quiet that plucked at the suspicions of the experienced, but a quiet that was odd by its very normality.  Rupert had gone to bed and to sleep gentle but silent; Elisabeth had wondered if it was worth trying to distract herself with teasing his thoughts out of him, whatever they were.  But it had proved both too exhausting and too disingenuous for her to pursue, so she turned in, equally silent, reached to turn off her bedside lamp, and subsided into the cool quiet of the country dark.

            Deep in the small hours, in the very womb of sleep, the dream came for her again; a double betrayal in the quiet, worse than ever, consuming all at once every hope of riding it out unshaken.  It ate on her very spirit like acid, and she cried out, hating her image, hating that she inhabited it, hating Rupert for failing to save her—for, she realized afresh at the exquisite point of torture, not even wanting to save her.  Inevitably, his grip upon her firmed, became more real than even the hateful pleading look on her own face as she watched from the First’s point of view; and she struggled and woke in the darkness, with the tears smutching her face.

            He had waked her, as he had so many times before; but as she gathered back her senses, she realized that she could not feel him in the bed with her.  Muzzily, she felt about, choking and sniffling back the residue of tears; but he had gone, leaving only his warmth in the covers behind him.

            “Rupert?” she said.

            No answer.

            She fumbled her way across the bed and felt for the night-table lamp on his side.  Light sprang up in the room to reveal him standing in his rumpled T-shirt and boxers, backed up against the windows: he was staring at her in the bed, his hands opening and closing, and he was trembling to the very muscles of his face.

            “Rupert,” she said again.  “What is it?”

            He made no answer, but the expression on his face hardened into—it looked like stone fury.  She shook her head in bewilderment.  “What?” she said again.

            He spoke in a husked voice she barely recognized:  “You lied to me.”

            Still she did not understand.  “Wh-what—are you—?”

            “You lied to me,” he repeated.  “You told me—” his voice caught dryly— “you told me your dreams were about the First.”

            The cold she felt was suddenly not from the night chill.  “I didn’t,” she said at once, and at the furious movement of his face, “I didn’t lie.  I wasn’t lying.”

            “You bloody well weren’t telling the truth,” he said.  His voice started out on the deadly quiet of anger, but slipped off the edge as he spoke.

            Elisabeth drew herself up straight in the bed and met his eyes.  “I told you what you needed to know.”

            “What I—” He stopped, and his hands clenched white.  “What I _needed to know_ was that you were dreaming about me.  About what happened.” He began to shake even harder.  “And you knew it!”

            “I—”

            “And how that’s different from a lie, I can’t—”

  

  1. You _do_ do the same.”
  



            Suddenly his face wilted, and any further words tumbled away from her grasp.

            “I thought—”  He swallowed, his eyes bright in an image that spoke to a nightmare deeper in her than the one she’d waked from.  “I thought I was comforting you.”

            “You were,” she said, and she covered her eyes, because the shame had come upon her.  “You were, Rupert.”  A new weeping fought its way out of her throat, into a horrible silence.  “It was a comfort.  I did need you,” she wept.  “I needed you to hold me s-so—I could pretend—this was the only reality—that you only—ever—loved—that I was never your enemy,” and with that terrible confession she was lost completely.  After a moment she couldn’t even weep quietly; sobs tore themselves out of her, dragging keening wails with them, as if in vengeance against her long silence.

            When exhaustion made her quiet, she realized that she’d curled up in a sitting ball on the bed, and he had joined her there, clinging to her foot with his head resting against her worn pajama leg.  She wiped uselessly at her wet face and snuffled, to get her breath back; but there was nothing to say.  She could feel the tremor of him where he touched her, the desperate coldness of his hands on her foot.

            After an interminable silence, in which the world stopped whirling and fell to a disastrous stillness, he said hollowly, without moving:  “Are you going to leave me?”

            Her heart stopped, then went again, painfully.  She whispered, equally hollowly, “Do you think I should?”

            At this he raised his head to sit up and look at her.  He looked much as she felt.  “I can’t argue against my own wishes,” he said.  “But—but if you can’t—if you can’t—if we can’t recover….”

            Elisabeth barked a mirthless laugh.  “I told Buffy just the other day—I’ve fallen into that awful cliché—I’d rather be miserable with you than happy without you.”

            “But I want you to be happy _with_ me,” he said, in a small voice that undid her again, and drew the last shameful secret out of her in a wail.

            “But what if I can’t?”  And she brought up her arms to cradle her head.  Her fears realized, she began to rock, keening as she had never done in her life, except perhaps that day in the training room, when the protection between her and her own darkness ended.

            But even this had its end, and shame gave way to remorse.  “I’m sorry,” she sobbed, “oh, Rupert, I’m so sorry.  I should have told you.  I should have told you what I—how bad I—…I kept you out, and maybe if I—if I hadn’t….But I was such a damn coward.  I couldn’t face it, and I should have—” she lifted her head— “and I’m sorry.”

            He looked like a lost child.  “It’s no worse than what I did,” he said.  “I owed you—I needed to tell you I knew what I did to you—what the real sin was.”  He glanced away from her face.  “I believed the lie and made you an enemy, and I thought I could go without saying it if I proved to you that…that it wasn’t ever going to be true anymore….But I was a coward too.”  He brought his eyes back to hers.

            She swallowed.  “So then…we won’t be cowards anymore?”

            The last of the habitual shadow of fear went out of his face, leaving only the grief.  “We won’t be cowards anymore,” he said.  Tentatively he reached for her, and she met him with a trembling hug.  They clung for a moment; then he pulled back.

            “Can I bring you some tea?” he said.

            She sniffled and reached to her side of the bed for a tissue.  “Yes, please,” she said.

            She watched him tie on his robe and work his feet into his slippers, in slow movements befitting a far older man.  “I’ll be back up,” he said to her in the bed; and he opened the door and shuffled out.

            As his footsteps died out down the stairs, she sat, shell-shocked, and cast her gaze over the room, staring numbly at the folds of the sheets and blankets at her feet, the yellow cast of the light over the bed and across the wall.  She had chosen the pale periwinkle color of paint on the walls; the tools for building a new bookshelf in the corner lay under the chair they both used for a clotheshorse; every line of the living house had been lovingly planned by themselves.  And could she tear this out of her and leave, even if it was right?

            No; the question had now become not _Could she leave?_ but _Could she stay?_

            But she had stopped ducking and running; and so had he: that one glance had spoken it for them both.  She could still crush him: but no longer with the truth.

            Trembling, she gathered herself together and crawled out of the bed to find her robe and slippers.

            Truth was more important than tea.

 

*

 

Buffy sat in her chair at the small kitchen table and warmed her hands with the cocoa mug, though it had lost its pricking heat.  Despite her exhaustion and her resolve, she had waked deep in the night with an urge to go out; she had resisted it for as long as she could, but finally gave in and tossed the covers off.

            It was as she was groping in the chill for something to change into that she heard the voices down the hall: not frustrated, or merely angry, but charged with a horrific grief.

            _It’s happened, then_, she thought.  And a rising wail—Elisabeth’s—confirmed it.

            Instead of reaching for outdoor clothes, Buffy had pulled on the cardigan Elisabeth had lent her over her sushi-pajama shirt, and padded as quietly as she could to the door and out into the passage.

            She almost drew back at the clearer sound of Elisabeth crying: nobody had the right to hear that kind of cry who wasn’t directly involved with it.  She could not hear Giles at all, and that was even worse.  Instead of drawing back, she hurried to the stairs and went down, stepping, though quickly, on the places that didn’t creak as she went.

            Now, she sat uselessly in the kitchen as the faint sounds of weeping faded and stopped, sipped at her cooling cocoa, and waited, stomach jittering, for the inevitable.  Presently it came: she heard the door open and footsteps shuffled to the steps and started heavily down, footsteps she knew as well as her own.

            But she was unprepared for how he would look, and when he appeared in the doorway, she nearly cried out.  But the urge passed, and she watched helplessly, mute, as Giles shuffled across the kitchen, with a brief glance at her, and reached slowly and shakily for the kettle.  He filled it enough for two and set it on the stove, but did not turn and move to sit with her at the table.  Buffy tried to get her throat working, to invite him over, but he spoke first, in a quiet voice she had never known.

            “Did we wake you?”  He turned his head a little, to catch her answer without quite looking at her.

            “No, I was awake,” Buffy said.  Then, hesitating:  “Did she tell you? About the dreams?”

            “I found out.” The bitterness in his voice was a bitterness turned inward.  He said, “You knew?”

            “I found out,” Buffy said, grimly.

            Giles nodded and turned his face to the stove again.

            After a moment, as the heat gathered, hissing, in the kettle, he reached for the tea tin and fished in it for two bags—camomile, Buffy knew, because she’d seen Elisabeth put them in.  He paused, his shoulders rounded down in a gesture that made Buffy want to get up and go to hold him.  But she still could not move, couldn’t even take her hands away from her cup.  Instead, she blurted softly, “Are you guys going to break up?”

            “That seems to be the question on the table,” Elisabeth said from the doorway.

            Both of them turned sharply to look at her.  Elisabeth carried as great a misery in her face as Giles did, with no less an air of repentant sorrow.  She had answered Buffy, but she was looking directly at him.  Buffy glanced to see Giles standing before the stove, with his hand on the oven door handle for vague support, his chin lifted bravely.  Behind him the kettle quietly poured forth volleys of steam.  She looked back at Elisabeth.

            “It’s too soon to say what’ll happen for sure,” she said quietly to Buffy, her voice roughened from weeping and her eyes still fixed on Giles.  “But from what I can see now, I think I will be able to stay.”

            She heard him give a sudden gasp, and tore her gaze from Elisabeth’s face to look at him.  He had turned and now stood straight and hard, facing the boiling kettle.  The room was paralyzed as they watched him fight for control, and get it, with a long, shivering breath.  After a moment, he reached with a badly shaking hand to open the nearby cupboard for teacups.  The cup he chose rattled loudly in its saucer as he brought it down; too late he moved his other hand to assist, and the cup racketed off the saucer and fell to the stone-tiled floor with a crash.

            The last musical rattle of the china shards quivered to silence.  Giles stood there, staring blankly at it and clutching the saucer.  “Oh dear,” he said softly.  “Oh dear.  Oh damn.”  Belatedly he sank into a crouch and began reaching for the larger pieces.

            Buffy felt she ought to help him, but Elisabeth acted first, lurching out of paralysis and gathering up the hand broom and tray from its hook on the wall on her way.

            “No, don’t move.  You’ll get shards through your slippers.”  She started sweeping around them where they crouched.

            Giles reached trembling to deposit his collection of shards in the tray and gathered more to put in the tray one by one.  “So clumsy,” he said.  “So sorry.”

            “It’s all right,” she said, soothingly, “it’s just a teacup.”

            “But—it was one of the nice ones,” he said.

            She lifted her head from her task to look him in the face.  “We’ll get more nice ones,” she said, with a look that made Buffy suck her lips in and bite them hard, blinking fast to stay ahead of the tears.

            “Let me,” Elisabeth said gently.  “I’ll do this; you sit.”  She put down the tray of shards, coaxed the saucer out of his hand, and assisted him to the table to sit at Buffy’s right.  He sank down without looking at her and lowered his helpless gaze to his hands.  He did not move until Elisabeth put his cup before him; then he lifted the small cup in both his hands and quaffed at it with his eyes tremblingly closed.

            When Elisabeth sat down across from him with her own cup, only paralysis kept Buffy in her seat.  “I should go,” she uttered.

            “You don’t need to,” Elisabeth said, and Giles lifted his head to look at her, saying nothing, but clearly agreeing.

            “Nah,” Buffy said.  “It’s all right; I was just going to do a patrol.  You know, for formality’s sake.”  Released, she scooted her chair back and rose.

            “I’ll wash your cup,” Elisabeth said; “you’re barefooted.”

            With a small smile Buffy released the cup and pushed it forward an inch, then retreated quickly to change upstairs.

            When she returned five minutes later, dressed and shod, she saw them still there in the kitchen as she passed: still sipping their tea, fragile and silent.

 

*

 

Buffy was still gone when they both reached the bottoms of their cups.  Elisabeth made to rise, but Rupert stirred.  “No,” he said softly, “I can.”  He rose slowly and took both their cups and Buffy’s to the sink to rinse; they rattled as he carried them, but only a little.

            Without discussing it, they turned out the kitchen light and padded single-file upstairs to bed.  Together they straightened the blankets and then shed their robes and slippers to climb in.  Rupert reached for his lamp; there was a click, then darkness returned.

            With her terrible secret gone, Elisabeth lay quiet, feeling light and hollow.  Her throat and her insides were raw from the ravages of grief and truth, but she was too exhausted even to register her own feeling.  She lay, waiting for sleep to come.

            The contours of the bedroom re-limned themselves in the darkness as her vision slowly adjusted; her warmth under the covers gathered; she could feel Rupert at her back, turned away from her and limply still.

            But he was not, she realized slowly, asleep.  And his grief was only begun, for he was weeping.

            She knew it with a sudden certainty that only grew as the darkness settled.  His body was not taut, and he made no noise; but she could feel the small catches in his breathing and the very subtle way he shifted himself so as not to disturb her.

            For a moment she nearly turned over to reach for him; but the urge died and passed off leaving her still as before.  It was not for her to comfort him; she had done this to him.

            She could not cry herself; she was dry.  So she lay, breathing slowly as if asleep, with all the energy of her listening focused on the other side of the bed.

            After a while he seemed to think she had fallen asleep, for he trusted himself to let the sharp breaths of his sobs be heard.  But only softly, and unvoiced; and nothing in him pulled taut.  She knew what it meant.  He was weeping without resistance because there was nothing to resist.

            She lay staring with burning dry eyes into the darkness.  For her penance she would listen to him till he fell asleep.

            But her exhaustion took her over, and she held out only till an hour before the first hint of dawn before succumbing to unconsciousness, asleep—though she did not know it—long before he.


	10. The Way of Dispossession

_In the middle, not only in the middle of the way_

_But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,_

_On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,_

_And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,_

_Risking enchantment.  Do not let me hear_

_Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,_

_Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,_

_Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God._

_The only wisdom we can hope to acquire_

_Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless._

—T. S. Eliot_, Four Quartets_

 

_She was halfway down the dusty road before her breath forced her to slow her quick, pelting steps.  How many hasty retreats had she beaten?  Too many to count.  But this time there was no sense of freedom to bring her relief.  She was merely going out into an outer room of the nightmare; there was no door beyond it._

_            Back to __Oxford__.  Perhaps she’d hurt him enough not to follow her there.  But it didn’t do to think of that: instead, _repeat the mantra_, she told herself.  _I must do this.  I must do this.  I must take this step—and this one—and this.  Don’t think about how much you’ll hate yourself for this; just do it.  Don’t think about the look on his face.  Just go.__

_            It was with a sense of inevitable doom that she heard the sound of car wheels on gravel in the distance behind her.  The sound grew in her ears till the car passed her—a beaten-up old car that looked like it had been used to transport gardening implements from one side of a farm to another.  To her dismay, it stopped several yards ahead of her, and the door popped open.  She did not wait for him to get out, but continued doggedly up the lane._

_            “Elisabeth,” Rupert said.  Then, when she did not stop:  “Elisabeth!”_

_            She tried to keep going, but then he added:  “You forgot your robe,” and she stuttered to a halt.  With her thumbs hooked in the straps of her knapsack, she waited without turning round for him to approach._

_            He came to her and into her sight, almost immediately holding out a doubled plastic grocery bag, through which she could see the rich rose color of his gift to her.  She did not move, and he held it out more insistently._

_            “I can’t,” she said, unable to look at him._

_            “You can, you know,” he said.  “A gift’s a gift.  Besides,” he added, bitterly, “isn’t it your custom to take souvenirs of the places you run away from?”_

_            At this she raised her head.  “That’s not fair.”_

_            His face was taut, the lines hard around his mouth.  “Isn’t it?  How is this different from any of your other great escapes?”_

_            Anger rose and nearly choked her.  “Escape to where?  There isn’t any escape.  And thank you very much for accusing me of cowardice, when it’s taking all the nerve I have to do this.”  She stalked ahead of him and onward._

_            “What could be so bad,” he called after her— “what could be so bad that you’ve got to hide up in—where, _ _Oxford_ _?  If you can’t get away from it, why leave me?”_

_            “I can’t tell you,” she said, trying and failing to keep her pace._

_            “That is unmitigated bollocks,” Rupert said, with emphasis.  “Suddenly you’re squeamish about meddling, after all these months?  You nurse me in your flat, you buy up my library, but now you can’t meddle?  Nothing but your own selfishness could explain that kind of inconsistency—”_

_            Elisabeth broke, and stopped to turn back and face him.  “Not even the Harrowing?” she said, forcefully._

_            He had been following her as he argued, but now he stopped short, looking blank.  A dusty silence settled between them for a moment, into which the cheerful song of a meadowlark poured.  Finally Rupert said, in a slow, dubious voice:_

_            “What do you know about that?”_

_            “Not very much,” Elisabeth replied evenly.  “Enough to be dangerous.”_

_            By the thoughtful look in his eyes, she could see that he had for a moment ceased to be a rejected lover and was now a field Watcher gathering signs._

_            “When?” he said._

_            “I don’t know.” She shrugged helplessly.  “I don’t even know _if_, anymore.”_

_            He drew a long breath.  “But soon.”_

_            “If it happens.  And I don’t want to be anywhere near it.”_

_            He met her eye, frowning, evaluating.  “You don’t want to be of any use in…a thing like that?”_

Of use to whom?_ she nearly said, but held it back.  “I don’t want to endanger your chances,” she said.  But still she could see that he was disappointed, that he was rethinking her status as an equal in his world.  She said, her voice scratching:  “Don’t you see, Rupert?  You need to be able to go to it—to risk your life—without being distracted by me.  Could you do that if I was at your side?”_

_            “If I can’t,” he said slowly, direct to her eyes, “I could no more do it apart from you than with you.”_

_            It was a challenge, she knew that much._

_            “I’m going back to _ _Oxford_ _,” she said, after a short silence.  “I’ll keep a watch from there.  I’ll find a way to get in touch with you, if it comes to that extremity.  But we’re safer if it doesn’t.”_

_            He gave a small nod, registering acceptance; but her proposal had not taken the disappointment from his eyes._

_            At last he jerked his head toward the ramshackle car behind them.  “I’ll take you to the station,” he said quietly._

_            She hesitated briefly, then followed him to the car and settled herself awkwardly in the passenger seat, with her knapsack between her feet.  Rupert held the door for her; but before he shut it, he held out the bag containing his gift._

_            With a lump in her throat, Elisabeth took it._

 

*

 

Despite being the last to fall asleep the night before, Rupert was up the earliest of anyone in the house.  In the fuzzed consciousness of paltry sleep, he made coffee, and while it was brewing went into the frigid conservatory to let out the cat, who was crying at the door.

            The actions of pulling a mug out of the cupboard and filling it with coffee were fraught with his memories of the night before, but he did it, with a methodical slowness.  He had not yet had the courage to look in the mirror.  With his coffee, he went into the study and stood at the French doors, looking out on the world.  The temperature had dropped like a stone since the weekend; he could feel the cold air leaching through the glass.  Perhaps they would have an excuse to light fires, since the chimneys were now clean and the stacks inspected.

            It was an idle thought:  even the homely comfort of a fire could not penetrate the marrow chill inside him.  He felt as one might who was trapped by an earthquake, looking up at the remainder of the structure over his head and waiting for it, too, to collapse.  Which it would: if not this minute, then the next.

            The thing to do was keep busy and not think about it.

            A black shape emerged from the dry grass in the back garden and trotted unerringly up the shallow steps to the porch before him.  For a moment Rupert stood unmoving; then the cat’s mouth opened in a miaow which could be faintly heard through the glass.  Rupert opened the door, letting both the cat and a brief gust of wind inside.

            Immediately the cat started rubbing against his shins and calves, purring.  “All right,” Rupert sighed, at the third circling pass, and started to putter back toward the kitchen.  The cat galloped lightly ahead of him and was sitting by his dish when Rupert gained the door.

            Feed the cat.  Put away the dishes in the drainer, including the three cups they’d used in the middle of the night.  Breakfast: he had had a vague thought of cooking eggs and bacon, which would likely tempt Elisabeth and Buffy out of bed—but now his stomach roiled at the very thought of it.  Instead, he forced himself to eat some cold cereal, went into the scullery-cum-utility room at the back to exchange his robe for a flannel shirt, jeans, and thick socks out of the dryer, and headed back to the conservatory to pull on his work boots and make his escape out into the cold.

            It seemed as good a time as any to begin the construction of the shelving unit he’d had planned for the utility room; currently their domestic accoutrements were constantly getting in among the tools and paintbrushes, and vice versa.  He’d already measured the space for it; all he needed to do was mark the lumber and cut it.  Which he proceeded to do, dragging out the relevant pieces and mounting them one by one on the sawhorses to measure and saw.  Measure twice, cut once.  That was what Xander had said; advice he had followed nowhere except in the act of building.  But planning was so dreary and exhausting—he was tired of measuring, of counting costs, of strategizing, of chess.  But thinking about it made the weight over his head seem heavier, so he shook the thoughts away and plied his saw with strong, rhythmic strokes that warmed him against the sharp breeze.

            When he had cut the boards that would become the outer frame of the shelves, he stopped, sweating.  He was too tired to finish the job.  Was this a function of despair, or was he just getting old?  Aching, he gathered his tools and put them away in the conservatory, then dithered over the cut boards for a moment before deciding finally to put them back under the tarp for the time being.

            The few moments he’d spent in the conservatory were enough to tell him that the others were up and about.  There was a clatter of crockery in the kitchen that sounded like the making of tea and toast.  For a moment Rupert wished he’d stayed inside; he could have been the one making tea, and serving it to Elisabeth—but he had ducked away, as he had that day in the training room, with the meditation that had gone so wrong—he’d left Tara to tend to her, had shied away from touching her, from picking up the pieces, and of course Elisabeth herself always wound up picking up the pieces, because he was manifestly not good at it—the crystal shards stuck to his palm as the china shards had fallen out of his reach, and he always left it to her to do, and then when he got back he would find her shivering and ill in her bathroom, and then what did he do but force her to look in the mirror?  But still she had stood, magisterial in the kitchen doorway, giving the lie to their mutual self-accusation of cowardice—on her end at least.  She knew herself better than he knew her—she’d said that despite appearances, she stayed with intolerable things out of brave stubbornness far more often than she quit them to run away; and this was exactly what she’d done, stayed with him, intolerable him, because she loved him, and took out the change in bad dreams.

            Rupert shook his head to clear it, but it didn’t clear.  He found his steps carrying to the kitchen almost against his will.  Perhaps by the time he reached her he would have assumed a shadow of the same strength she had found.

            In the kitchen, at the table, Buffy was sitting, dressed in fleece pants and a sweater, eating buttered toast with a cup of coffee at her elbow.  She stopped mid-chew as he entered; looked him briefly and searchingly in the face, then went back to eating.  At the counter Elisabeth, also dressed, was winding the string of her teabag around the back of a spoon, to squeeze the last drops of tea into her cup.  He stood silent; and then she glanced round at him.

            There was nothing magisterial about her look—to the contrary, her face was haunted by a hollow pain, a frightened remorse; and she snatched her gaze back to the tea miserably, before she could meet his eye.

            He couldn’t even think.  For a moment he stood frozen to the spot, staring at her as she moved slowly to stir sugar into her tea.  Then he cleared his throat.

            “I—er—”  He stopped, cleared his throat again and found something to utter.  “I—need to go to the lumber yard—some fastenings….”  He stopped again and drew breath with an effort.  “I’m not sure when I’ll be back—sometime this afternoon.”  He couldn’t think of a non-awkward way to take leave of them, so he turned abruptly and went to get his coat and keys without saying goodbye.

            On the porch he took in several breaths of the freezing air, in an attempt to clear his head; then strode quickly for the car.

            They would think he was making an escape, and probably he was; but this had got beyond him.

 

*

 

In the kitchen, they listened to the start of the engine, then the retreat of Giles’s car down the lane.  Slowly Elisabeth stirred milk into her tea.

            Buffy stared at her for a long moment, but when she didn’t look up, threw caution to the winds and spoke.

            “So,” she said, “where’s he really going?”

            Even then Elisabeth did not look up.  She took the slow spoon out of her teacup and put it down to sip at the tea.  “At a guess?” she said quietly.  “He’s probably going to see Anne.”

            “Your priest friend?”  Buffy looked at her dubiously, but Elisabeth only stared out the window, misery etched on her face, and sipped her tea.

            “I’ve hurt him,” she said, after a long silence, “and he doesn’t know what to do about it.”

            It seemed to Buffy that this whole thing was about Giles’s guilt at having hurt her, but maybe it all came to the same thing in the end.  No way to perform any surgeries at all, without twisting the knife.

            Abruptly Elisabeth put down her tea, only half-drunk.  “I think I’m going to have my shower now.”  But instead of making her exit, she stood restively where she was, with her hand on the counter, her thumbnail drawing lines on its surface.  It was time enough for Buffy to form her resolution.

            “Elisabeth…I think I’m going to spend tonight at the flat.  I…think you guys need to be alone tonight.”

            Elisabeth gave a quick shake of the head.  “Oh—no, that’s not nec—”

            “You guys need to have a chance to talk,” Buffy said firmly.

            Elisabeth turned her face away.  “I don’t know if he wants to talk,” she said, in a small voice.

            “Well,” Buffy said, “if your priest friend is any good at giving advice….”

            Without looking round, Elisabeth nodded several times.  “Yeah.  Okay.  I’ll…well, we’ll get you a ride into town.”  She nodded again, then with a visible resolve moved forward and went out of the room.

            Buffy blew out a hard breath, pouching her cheeks, and wondered if being grown up meant you had no one you could talk to.

 

*

 

In her kitchen at the vicarage, Anne Langland checked over the satchel she had packed, stopping occasionally to take a sip of her nearly-cold tea.  She had a hospice visit, two sickbeds to attend, and one home visit for tea and direction, to a parishioner who had been recently ill and unable to drive into town.  It was always like this near Christmas; or perhaps the addition of Christmas preparations made the clamor of need more noticeable.  Her next task would be to put on her shoes and coat and get the car out of its tiny garage.  Anne dumped the remainder of the tea down the sink, took her satchel out to the foyer, and went to find her shoes.

            She had just slipped them on and was shrugging into a cardigan when the doorbell rang.  Anne sighed.  If it was a church emergency, it would have to be managed by someone else.  Quickly she strode to the door and pulled it open.

            On the doorstep stood a very haggard Rupert Giles, clutching his unzipped jacket together against the sharp wind.  He met her eye and paled.

            “Please can I talk to you?” he said hoarsely.

            A small silence fell.  Then:  “Oh dear,” Anne said.

            He said nothing else, but silently begged her to help; so she took a quick, deciding breath and said:  “Let me make a phone call.”  She stepped back to let him in.

            But he hesitated on the threshold.  “You’re going out,” he said, interpreting at last her fully-dressed state.  “I can’t disrupt your—”

            “It can be rearranged, don’t you worry,” Anne said.  “Go have a seat in the front room.”  As he moved ahead of her, she read the drooping set of his shoulders: he was quite near collapse if not in the midst of it already.  Briskly she shut the front door and went to use the kitchen phone.

            When she returned, bringing with her a glass of cold water, she found him in one of the corner chairs, bent with his hands clasped low between his knees.  He did not look up at her approach.  Anne pulled a small endtable close to him and set the water on it.  “Drink this,” she commanded, and moved a chair for herself.

            With his eyes still cast down, Rupert obeyed.  He drank half the water, and when he set it back down a little color had returned to his face.

            “What’s happened?” Anne said, though she almost didn’t want to know.

            “Oh,” he said, in a small voice she’d never heard him use, “I don’t know where to start.”

            Anne sank back in her chair.  “Oh, my dear friend,” she sighed, “why not start where it hurts the most?”

 

*

 

It surprised Buffy not at all when Elisabeth, instead of working on her thesis, attacked the dirt in the house with a desperate fury.  She started in the kitchen: Buffy silently got out of her way, and as she set herself the task of organizing the miscellaneous work materials in the conservatory, she could hear water running and the sound of fervid scrubbing.  When she crossed round to the front of the house to get the trowel Giles had left there after putting in the solar path lights, she saw that the diamond panes of the kitchen window were fogged with the heat of Elisabeth’s efforts.

            It seemed to her a perfect symbol of what they were all doing.

            The conservatory was, unfortunately, clean and organized in less than an hour.  Elisabeth had, from the sound of it, carried operations to the bathroom upstairs: she heard intermittent sounds of water running in the bath, and if that weren’t clue enough, the cat came trotting down the staircase to get away from the commotion.

            Buffy stood, looking around at her handiwork.  The paint cans were all against one wall, stacked according to color, the opened ones on top.  The tools were against the other wall.  The remaining lumber was neatly set aside to clear the footpath to the door, and the ladder had been nested in the corner, next to the large hand sander and the shop vac.  She needed something else to do; but if she cleaned a room, it meant Elisabeth couldn’t clean it, and Elisabeth needed the distraction more than she did.  She decided to look for something Elisabeth would be disinclined or unable to do.

            In the livingroom—which Giles had called the front parlor—there needed only sweeping and window-washing; the floor had been sanded and oiled, and only one wall was left with the old wallpaper still on; that had been designated a group task for after Christmas.  Buffy screwed up her mouth thoughtfully in the doorway, then went back down the hall.

            Needles had fallen from their garland to the floor, but that was a task Elisabeth would want for herself.  In the study there was only Giles’s desk and the armoire containing (Buffy looked) his herbs and talismans, two stakes, a small crossbow (unbolted), and a half-empty bottle of scotch.  Buffy gave a deep sigh and leaned her head back to contemplate the ceiling.  The dust-grimed frescoes, Giles had said, were a delicate project that might take a couple of years.  A couple of years, she thought.  Yes, there was more than a year’s work here.

            But the chandelier could be cleaned at any time.

            Buffy remembered hearing somewhere that one could clean a chandelier by taking off all the drops and washing them, without toiling on a ladder, but toiling on a ladder was precisely what appealed at the moment.  So she went and pulled the ladder from its new niche in the conservatory, nicked a drop-cloth off a shelf on her way, and set them up beneath the chandelier.  Then she took a small pail and went into the kitchen, now full of shiny surfaces and neat rows of tins and appliances, to fill with soapy water.

            She had chosen well: it turned out to be a very relaxing task, to stand with feet planted firmly on a high rung of the ladder, removing drops one by one and washing them in the pail of suds, then drying them with a towel and rehanging them.  As she worked, she occasionally wiped at the tarnished frame; though the tarnish could not be removed with soap and water, the dust could.

            “My goodness,” someone said suddenly.

            Buffy started, then carefully looked round to avoid upsetting the ladder:  Elisabeth was standing below in the doorway, a broom in one hand.

            Elisabeth didn’t waste any more words on her surprise at seeing Buffy up a ladder.  “Thank you for doing that,” she said.  “It needed doing.”

            “It’s a pretty chandelier,” Buffy said.  What on earth had happened to her?  She had picked up Giles’s English habit of oblique conversation.  Of course, before this, she had fallen out of the habit of carrying on any conversation at all.  Before this, any conversation at all had been like rearranging useless bandages on an open wound.  And now that they had no literal wounds to be preoccupied with, the figurative ones were becoming less and less bearable.

            Lost in her thoughts, Buffy had forgotten that Elisabeth had been standing there; but when she looked down, she saw that Elisabeth had gone.  In the hallway she could hear the sound of sweeping: the pine needles.

            With a silent sigh Buffy got back to work.

 

*

 

Despite the fact that telling the most painful impact of the moment—Elisabeth’s dream—made Rupert’s narrative wander, Anne was able to get most of it out of him in less than an hour.  Buffy’s accusation and his recriminations, his increasing weariness, the fight he picked with Elisabeth about his drinking habits, all of them came haltingly but simply; he was in too much pain to elaborate upon them.  By the time he was finished he was shivering from the mere trauma of self-disclosure.  Anne made him drink the rest of the water, and then got up to get him more.  At the doorway she stopped and turned to him.

            “If you and Buffy, and you and Elisabeth, have chosen honesty, then what do you fear now?”

            He answered at once, huskily, “That it won’t be enough.  That it won’t change anything.” 

            “Why wouldn’t it?”

            He looked away and held himself more closely.  “If the truth is…if the truth is, I can’t but make her miserable….”  He did not finish the sentence, and did not clarify whether it was Buffy or Elisabeth he meant, or both.

            Anne could not reply.  She was all too familiar with the temptation to claim all blame to obscure her own helplessness; and Rupert was past the point of benefiting from admonishment.  Silently she went back to the kitchen for the water.

            But Rupert had anticipated her.  When she returned, he said, “Tell me: what must I do?  I can’t think.”

            “Then you must rest,” Anne said.  Then, “Come.”  She tipped her head for him to follow her.  Slowly, shakily, he rose from his chair and obeyed.

            At the door of the guest room, she gestured him inside and went in herself to place his water on the small table by the rocking-chair.

            “I must go,” she told him, apology in her voice.  “I have visits that can’t be delayed.  But you should rest here as long as you need.  Don’t try to think—it’s not time for that.”

            He simply looked at her, forlorn, like a little boy.  Anne gave in to her maternal instincts so far as to say, “And for heaven’s sake, eat something before you go home.  There are plenty of sandwich makings in the kitchen.”

            He gave her a faint smile in reply.  She resisted the impulse to touch him, and walked—calmly, she hoped—from the room.

            As she regathered her things and took her car keys from the table drawer in the foyer, Anne found herself revolving an even further change to her plans:  Pyke’s Lea was not far out of the way of her second visit.  Reading between the lines of Rupert’s unlinear story, she sensed that Elisabeth needed as much succor as he, though she was more likely to have a clear narrative to give.

            Anne gave a private, fervent, frustrated sigh, though she hardly knew what distressed her the most, and stepped resolutely from the vicarage.

 

*

 

The phone rang, and Brian winced.  “What fresh hell is this?” he muttered, and tossed down his pen onto the paper he was editing.  He followed the pen with his reading glasses and went to answer it.

            “Hullo?”

            “Uh…is Brian there?”

            “Speaking.”

            “Hi.  This is Buffy Summers.”

            “Eh?...Oh! right.  Good morning…er, afternoon.”

            “Hey.”  Buffy hesitated.  “I…I was going to spend some time in town this evening, only Giles has gone with the car.  So Elisabeth suggested we get in touch with you and ask if I could get a ride to the flat this afternoon, to save Giles from having to go right back to Oxford when he gets home.”

            “Oh?  Well,” Brian said, gallantly, “I should be happy to do that.  Where _is_ Elisabeth, by the way?”

            “She’s in the shower.”  Buffy said it with the nonchalance that marked the amateur liar.  Brian smelled trouble.

            “What’s up?” he said.

            “Oh, nothing very much, just getting some cleaning done before Christmas.”

            “No,” Brian said, “sorry, I meant, what’s wrong?”

            “Nothing’s wrong.”  This was even more nonchalant.  Brian snorted.

            “Well, I give you fair warning,” he said.  “The fare for a ride to Oxford will be telling me about it in the car.  In fact—” the idea came at once, and he brightened— “perhaps, if you are not already engaged, you might come to the Mohel with me for a bite of dinner and a pint.”

            “I can’t believe it—”

            “What?”

            “British people really _do_ talk like that.  I was beginning to think Giles was putting it on to tease me.”

            “Well,” Brian said indulgently, “not all British people.  Geeks, mostly.”

            Buffy groaned.

            “Swots and Oxford types,” Brian grinned, rubbing it in.  “Dons, abnormal folk like that.”

            “All right!  All right!  I’m sorry I said that.  Okay?”

            Brian laughed.  “What time shall I pick you up?”

            A pause, as if for looking for a clock.  “Is four-thirty good?”

            “Certainly.  Four-thirty it is.  I’ll see you then.”

            “Okay.  Good.  Thank you.”

            “Till later, then.”

            Brian put down the phone and went grinning back to his paper.

 

*

 

Rupert opened his eyes.  He was still in the pale green bedroom, cradled in the rocking chair Anne had ushered him to.  He glanced at the bedside clock across the room, and was amazed to realize he had fallen asleep.

            The vicarage was quiet, and felt empty of all presence save his: he could hear his own little movements—the creak of the chair, the rustle of his clothing.  Above the bureau hung a small icon of the Magdalene with her scarlet egg; a glass votive candle-holder stood on the bureau’s surface beneath it, with a dark smudge of smokestain on the inside surface.  The room was homely, with a white quilt over the antique bed and a faded green rug under his feet.

            And Anne had been right, of course: it was not the time to think.  It was, regrettably, the time to feel—but he had come to such extremity that feeling was blunt force, unrecognizable.  His next move would be to go home; to go home and find Elisabeth and talk to her, seriously and thoroughly.  He knew exactly what he wanted to ask her, and sensed vaguely that in earlier stages the feeling driving his questions would have been anger; now, it was simply urgency.  Too, in some distant portion of his mind, he recognized that he had agonized over the likelihood that he had really damaged her, and then been affronted when he realized it was true.  There wasn’t an obvious way to deal with that.  Perhaps Elisabeth herself would have a notion.

            If she wanted to talk to him.

            He felt it was time to leave, but a few minutes passed before he made an effort to stir from the chair.  When he did attempt to rise, he had to pause for a moment and gather strength all over again.

            After a pause in the bathroom to relieve himself and wash his face, he made his way down the hall and out to the foyer of the vicarage.  The light of day was not going to last much longer; in fact, it would be close to evening by the time he reached Pyke’s Lea.  This quickened his footsteps to the door, which he locked behind him, hoping that Anne had taken her key with her.

            He stood on the front step and drew in a shaky breath.

            It was time to go home.

 

*

 

Buffy pinned up her wet hair with a little more attention than she’d given it the last few days.  She wasn’t exactly looking forward to telling Brian about what had been going on—it felt like a betrayal waiting to happen—but she wasn’t going to look shabby while doing it.

            And she wasn’t going to get shitfaced, if she could help it.

            She donned jeans, boots, and—not the red sweater this time—a light-blue one that she’d swiped from Dawn.  (And serve her right, after all those years of raided closets and stained outfits.)

            She glanced at the bedside clock—a little after three-thirty.  She wasn’t sure how long it’d take Brian to get out to Pyke’s Lea, or what his car looked like, so she thumped lightly down the stairs, to find Elisabeth and ask.

            But as she reached the kitchen, she realized that Elisabeth wasn’t alone.  Through the doorway she saw the back view of a woman in a blue windbreaker, with short ash-blond hair: Elisabeth, facing her, was pinching the bridge of her nose, eyes closed.

            “I can’t believe I was so arrogant,” she said, with the flat weight of suppressed tears in her voice.  “I told him I could stay with him, but—what if he can’t stay with me?”

            “You fear he’ll try to play the hero?” the other woman said gently.  She had a clear, supple English voice; and Buffy realized suddenly who this was.

            Elisabeth took her hand away and looked aside miserably, toward the window.  “I don’t know—I don’t know.”  She gave her head a small shake.  “I don’t know what he’ll do.”

            “Well, certainly Buffy’s proposed plan is a good one,” her friend said mildly.  “I dare say without any distractions in which to take refuge, you should be able to talk with him to some purpose.”

            There was humor in her voice, but Elisabeth looked at her, stricken.  “I think I’ve really screwed up,” she said.

            As Buffy watched, the woman’s hand hesitated, then reached to touch Elisabeth’s shoulder.  Elisabeth unconsciously reached to support her friend’s arm, and sighed toward the window once more.

            “Don’t be afraid to go forward,” she said.  “The best thing you can do for him is to trust your own strength.”

            “I don’t suppose you’ll let me say I don’t have any,” Elisabeth said, reluctantly.

            “Well, you could say it—but it’d be complete rubbish, as you very well know.”

            The woman turned, half-smiling, but stopped when she saw Buffy; Buffy found that she had drifted to the doorway and leaned against it, biting her lip.

            “Oh! Buffy,” Elisabeth said suddenly, “I’m sorry.  Were you wanting to…?”

            “No, I’m all right,” Buffy said hastily.  “I just was going to ask how long it might take Brian to drive up here.”

            Elisabeth glanced over at the clock.  “Oh, he won’t have left yet.  Perhaps…well, first I’d better…Buffy, this is Anne Langland.  Anne—Buffy Summers.”

            “Yes, of course,” Anne said, stretching forth a slim hand for Buffy to shake.  She was the youngest person Buffy had ever seen in a clerical collar—Caleb, she told herself, did not count—and certainly not very much older than Elisabeth herself.  “I’ve heard a great deal about you,” Anne said.  “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

            “Yeah,” Buffy said, then added awkwardly, “I mean—I’ve heard a lot about—I  mean, good to meet you.”  She flushed hot and said, “Uh, Elisabeth, maybe you could re-introduce us, in Italian?  My English just went on the fritz.”

            Anne smiled.

            “Anne,” Elisabeth said, “is headed to another home visit, but she’s going past the flat.  Maybe you could catch a ride with her? and save us dragging Brian out here.”

            Buffy did not like the idea.  Little as she had wanted to spill her guts to Brian about what had been happening, she at least thought of him as more or less a known quantity.  There was something very disconcerting about this priest—there was no bullshit about her, which could either mean something very good or something very bad.  But as she caught Elisabeth’s eye, she remembered suddenly why Elisabeth had avoided at all costs talking to Brian on the phone today.

            “Okay,” she said, with what she hoped was a light shrug.  “But we’d better call him and give him the heads-up.”

            “I can do that.”  Anne pulled her cell out of the pocket of her windbreaker.

            “You’ve got Brian in your speed-dial?” Elisabeth said, voicing Buffy’s thought.

            Anne sighed.  “I’ve got everyone in my speed-dial.  What parish priests did before wireless technology, I can’t imagine.”

            They watched Anne as she identified herself to Brian and outlined the new plan.  Faintly, Buffy heard him reply:  “What the hell is going on?”

            “Nothing out of the way.  You’ll get the full report soon, I’m sure.”

            “Well, I want to talk to Buffy for a moment, please.  Is she there?”

            Buffy reached out and took the little phone Anne handed to her.

            “Hey,” she said.

            “Hello,” Brian said.  “Am I correct in guessing that Anne isn’t just there to pay a casual call?”

            “Well,” Buffy said, darting an uncomfortable glance at Elisabeth, who was intently studying her own shoes, “no, not really.”

            “And Elisabeth is actively avoiding talking to me?”

            “Well….”

            “She always does when she’s upset.  Hell,” Brian sighed.  Then, tentatively, “Are you still interested in a bite at the Mohel?”

            Buffy gave it a pause for thought, though it didn’t really need deciding.  “Yeah.  Yeah, I think so.”

            “Right,” Brian said.  “Why don’t I call for you at the flat an hour hence?”

            “See, this is what I’m talking about,” Buffy said.  “Nobody uses the word ‘hence’ seriously in a sentence.”

            “Well, I have to keep up my reputation,” Brian said, solemnly.  “Till later, then.”

            “Bye.”

            Buffy folded shut the phone and handed it back to Anne.

            “I take it you’re the one deputed to give the report,” Anne said, smiling as she pocketed it.

            Buffy glanced at Elisabeth, but Elisabeth was looking at her gratefully.  “Yeah,” she replied finally.  “Looks like.  Well, I’m ready to go whenever.”

            “Excellent,” Anne said, with a brisk gesture.

            “I’ll get my jacket.”

 

*

 

Anne paused in the doorway as they were leaving to give Elisabeth a brief, tender hug, which Buffy politely pretended not to see; then Anne led the way to her car, which as it turned out was very small indeed, though neatly kept.

            As they pulled out of the lane onto the road toward Oxford, Buffy cast a few speculative glances at her companion.  The priest’s hands were quiet on the wheel, her gaze level and calm ahead.

            “So you’ve been spending some time in Italy,” she said, after a silence.

            “Rome, yeah,” Buffy said, and waited for the inquisition to start.

            But it didn’t.  “I made a pilgrimage to St. Peter’s Square once, to hear the Pope give his blessing,” Anne said, without elaborating.

            Buffy blinked, then frowned.  “I thought you were Church of England,” she said, puzzled.

            “I was raised Catholic,” Anne said, negotiating a turn.  “But when I felt the call to ordination, I had to make a very painful break.”  She allowed herself a small sigh.  “I feel it most round Christmastime; it’s such a family-centered holiday.”

            Buffy sighed, thinking of Hank and Denise and “the boys.”  “For better _and_ for worse,” she said aloud.

            A small wry smile touched the priest’s thin lips.  “Indeed.”

            Buffy wanted to ask her if Giles had indeed gone to see her—presumably he had, since she had then stopped at Pyke’s Lea—but she feared what Anne might tell her.  So she sat silent for the rest of the journey; and Anne did not press her to make small talk: she seemed to be in a thoughtful reverie of her own.

            When they pulled up at the flat, Buffy said:  “Thanks for the ride.”

            “You’re quite welcome,” Anne said.  Buffy opened the door and got out; Anne leaned across and added, with a humorous look that was not quite a smile:  “And tell Brian to behave himself.”

            Buffy’s discomfort slipped a notch.  She grinned.  “I’ll tell him you said that.”

            She shut the door, and without waiting to see Anne drive off, hurried through the cold up to the door of Elisabeth’s flat.

 

*

 

For the first time in what seemed like forever, Elisabeth was alone in the house.  She went and took a shower, which filled the silence for a short while; then dressed in her most comfortable fleece pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt that Rupert had abandoned to her possession.  With her hair in a damp bun, she went down to the kitchen with the thought of making tea—only to discover that she had made it, and left it steeping for an hour and a half.  With a noise of disgust she dumped out the tea and washed the cup.

            But she hadn’t the heart to make a fresh one.  Instead she stood, drearily staring at the countertop with its tea tins and sugar bowl.

            She was still staring when she heard the sound of tires in the drive, then footsteps, then keys at the door.  Instantly her breath contracted, and she moved closer to the counter as if for support.

            Quietly, Rupert shuffled into the room.  She forced herself to look at him, and saw that he was looking at her with the same air of wincing trepidation.  Their eyes met, and for a long minute the silence reigned.

            Then, “Hallo,” he said softly.

            “Hi,” she answered.

            He shifted on his feet.  “I—er….”  He glanced around, as if suddenly absorbing the full import of the house’s silence.  “Where’s Buffy?”

            Elisabeth said, “She caught a ride with Anne back to the flat for the night.  Her own idea.”

            “Ah,” he said, and she saw him relax a little, now that she had freed him from the need to explain his absence.

            “I—I was going to make some tea,” Elisabeth said timidly, glancing over at the kettle.  “D’you want to make some before we talk, or—?”  But looking at him, she saw that his eyes were fixed on her face.  “No, then,” she answered herself.  “Yes.  I think you’re right.”

            At this he glanced around him, as if looking for the right venue for what had come upon them; and she was freed to go forward and take him by the hand.  Without thinking more than a footstep ahead, she drew him with her out of the kitchen and down the hall, inevitably, to the study.

            There was still no furniture in it save the desk and its chair, but that mattered little.  Without ceremony Elisabeth sank to the floor under the chandelier (sparkling now, thanks to Buffy) and crossed her legs tailor-fashion.  After a second’s hesitation Rupert sat down himself, facing her an arm’s length away.

            She was on the verge of asking awkwardly whether he’d like to start, when he stirred himself suddenly and said:  “I need to ask you one thing.”

            Her heart beat harder; she nodded.

            His eyes were suddenly very direct.  “When you said you could stay, did you do it just to make me feel better?”

            She shook her head at once, flushing, because she deserved that.  “No,” she said.

            “Then why?  What makes it true?”

            His gaze was so nakedly, avidly sharp that her eyes watered, meeting it.  “This,” she said, hardily.  “This makes it true.  I couldn’t—” she looked away and brushed back a tendril of her hair— “I couldn’t have done what we were doing much longer—soldiering on and lying to one another.”  She swallowed against the hot threat of tears.  “I didn’t like the person I was becoming—a placating person, a small, begging person—colluding in that awful silence—and I felt I was making you into something equally horrible—”

            She stopped.  After a moment she dared to look up at him; his mouth was very sad, but he nodded.

            “If we can be honest—if we can look each other in the eye at the end of the day—that’s what I need,” she said.

            He nodded again.

            “And—” she swallowed again— “I should start by telling you the truth about my dreams.”  Her gaze failed and she dropped her eyes to her hands in her lap.  “I do dream about…what happened that night, but…it changes at the end.  At the end the—the First is there, as me.”  She plaited her fingers hard together.  “And then I’m looking at it all from the First’s point of view, and—hating the me that’s being hurt—feeling that—that me couldn’t possibly be humiliated enough to satisfy me.  The horrible part is not—” she looked up— “not you, Rupert.  It’s…being made out of hatred, and the bitterness of knowing no one will save me from it.”

            Rupert cleared his throat, but his voice when it came was low and steady.  “That’s why it _is_ about me,” he said.  “I ought to have saved you from it.”

            Elisabeth shook her head.  “No.  _I_ should have saved me from it.  I put on your betrayal the extra weight of…failing to save my soul, when that wasn’t—your job.  That’s the real wrong I did you, whether you knew it or not.”

            Now he was looking down at his hands.  “I should at least have wanted to,” he said, in a very soft voice.  “I did, for a little.  But I gave it up.”

            His words, low and shamed, were an acceptance of the compassion he had thrown back in her face that night, and she ached to reach for him, to touch him and grieve for him and herself.  But it was not the moment to do that, not yet.  Elisabeth bit hard on the inside of her lips and forced her breathing to even.

            In the silence, he spoke again.  “Can you forgive me?”

            He did not look up; she half-reached for him, and his eyes came up to hers.

            “I did,” Elisabeth said.  “I do.  I will.”

            He lowered his gaze and nodded, but no relief came into his face.

            “Rupert—”  But she could frame no question to ask him, and ended by waiting for him to speak.

            “I would have tried to walk away, at the end,” he said, at length.  “I wanted to.  To disappear.  But I already knew it wasn’t any use.  There’s nowhere I can go that isn’t….  And staying—I’m not any use to Buffy now, you know.  Half the advice I could give means nothing in this new world, and the other half she wouldn’t take.”  He stared at the pattern of the rug, his face hard and closed.

            “Just as well,” Elisabeth answered quietly.  “That’s not what you were made to do.”

            He gave a weak snort.  “Nor fight, nor manage computer files.  If I were younger—”

            Elisabeth ignored that, and said:  “You weren’t made to give advice.  You were made to give yourself.  You think that’s not of value?”

            Suddenly he put his long hands over his face.  “But I’m tired,” he said, “I’m just so tired.”

            As she watched, his shoulders began to shake, though he made no sound.  Was this the time to touch him?  It didn’t matter anymore: even as she thought it, she was putting out hands to shore him up, to scoot her backside closer, to invite him into her arms.  He bent, slowly, and hid his face in the hollow of her shoulder; his hands knotted themselves in a gripful of her shirt, and he let her bear up his weight as her arms went around him.

            Eyes closed on her own tears, she rested her lips on his hair and held him, unmoving, not even rocking.  He wept as noiselessly as he had the night before, but now he was shivering with it, with an effort either to hold back or bring more forth, she could not tell which.  _If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you_, registered briefly in her consciousness, but she let it pass without growing into thought.  He choked on a breath, and though he shook harder, he could not stop his voice from rising in a half-strangled keen; after a moment he gave up and let his voice do what it would.  At the sound, she moved one hand to cradle the back of his head and shut her eyes tighter.

            He wept as she had done, as how a child confesses a shameful secret, though the secret did not even need guessing.  As she held him, the preoccupations of self fell away and her world became only the feel and movement of him in her arms, the convulsive clutch of his hands on her shirt, her own thick swallowing.

            His keening passed; he relaxed into her and subsided in soft chuffing sobs.  Now she opened her eyes, sniffling, and moved her hand to stroke down his hair, once, and then again.

            He coughed through the spume of tears and spoke, in a soft, hopeless voice:  “I hate what I’ve become.”

            “I know,” she whispered, choking.  “I know you do.”  Then she urged him to sit up so she could look him in the face, and reluctantly he did.

            “But you do understand, don’t you,” she said, laying her hand along his cheek, “you do understand that there’s no version of you I won’t love—one way or another.  Any you; every possible you.”

            “I know,” he said, and fresh tears spilled over her hand.  “That’s why I wanted to give you better.”

            She tried to say his name, but wept instead; kissed his tears off her fingers, and touched her brow to his: and his hand came up to touch hers where she caressed him.  Presently she pulled away.

            “But you won’t,” she choked, “you won’t try to save me from yourself?”

            He sat up further and swiped at his nose with one hand.  “No,” he said, “I promise I’ll make you suffer.”

            She laughed at this, as he had meant her to, and he managed a small smile.

            After a moment, Elisabeth drew a long breath and overcame both tears and laughter.  “Oh, Rupert,” she said.  “I had such a terrible revelation.  I didn’t understand how much I hurt you when I left you for your own good—until I feared you might do it to me.”  He smiled sadly, and she said to his eyes, “I’m sorry.”

            He replied in the same kind:  “I forgive you,” and something hard taut in her was released.  She accepted it with a shivery breath.

            Rupert wiped his face neatly, and began to get to his feet with steady, calm movements.  “You _can_ make it up to me,” he said.

            “Oh?”  She looked up at him from where she sat, and he reached down to her.

            “Drink with me?” he said, offering his hand.

            What felt like her first smile ever dawned in her face.

            “I thought you’d never ask,” she said.

 

*

 

Brian let Buffy set the tone for the evening.  It was a courtesy he felt he owed her, though if it had been left to him he would have got straight to the heart of the matter.  He had an idea that Buffy was of the same sort of disposition, but tonight she was pensive and slow to speak.  She picked at her fish and chips, eyes downcast: he took the opportunity to make a study of this strange girl.  Long straight hair, California blond, pulled up in a stylishly messy knot; smooth golden skin, winter-pale; thin shoulders, accented by the careless chic of her sweater and jacket.  It was her hands, though, that drew his attention, sinewy and scarred, with gently-square nails filed short and unadorned.  They were quick in movement, as carelessly precise as the rest of her.  He wondered if he would have seen their significance if he hadn’t known she was the Slayer.  He liked to think he would have: Brian had a high value for careless precision.

            As if feeling his scrutiny, Buffy looked up, and cast him a wisecracking grin.  “So what happened to the inquisition?” she said.

            Brian blew out his cheeks and reached for his pint.  “Let me see if I can guess,” he said.  “Some fault line or other gave way, and now Elisabeth and Rupert are at some sort of crisis.  They’ve been exuding tension for weeks now, so it’s no surprise really.”  He took a long sip of his ale, casting Buffy a glance over the rim.

            Buffy made a face that said, _That’s about the size of it_, and added, “It was pretty hard not to see it coming.”

            “Are they on the rocks then?” Brian inquired, with a fine nervousness.

            Instead of answering, Buffy tilted her head back and frowned at him.  “Do you want them to be?”

            He heaved out a long sigh.  “I dunno.  Six months ago, I would have said, yes, absolutely.  Now I don’t know.  I thought he was bad for her then, and I’m not so sure my opinion’s changed.”  He might as well be frank.

            She was still squinting at him thoughtfully.  Suddenly she threw him a blunt question:  “Are you in love with Elisabeth?”

            Brian sat back in his seat to turn that one over, and catch his breath.  “No,” he said finally.  “But…well, she’s my only best friend, you know.  I had mates at home, back in Manchester, but that’s different.”  He turned his glass around idly, still thinking.  He didn’t know how to say that he disliked getting too close to people unless they really meant something to him, without risking this conversation becoming a psych confession session.  He decided to leave it, and let Buffy figure that out on her own.  He had no doubt she was capable, though she seemed not to be fully aware of her non-physical abilities.

            But Buffy’s thoughts tended in a different direction.  “And Giles,” she said, “is my only Watcher.”  She rose from the table.  “Shall I get the next round?” she asked, with a mocking delicacy.

 

*

 

Before hitting the liquor, even before leaving the study, the first thing Elisabeth and Rupert did on getting to their feet was to come together in a quiet embrace, without awkwardness or hesitation.  With her eyes closed, Elisabeth nestled against his breast, breathing as softly as he; his strong, steady heartbeat against her ear belying his claim to debilitating age.  For once there was no hurry, no apprehension of the horizon of their tenderness, no more fear of losing what they had barely grasped.

            Presently she lifted her head and looked up at him; he opened his eyes.  “Have you eaten?” she asked him.

            He shrugged and quirked his head.  “Anne suggested I make myself a sandwich before I left the vicarage.”

            “And did you?”

            His lips twitched.  “No….Have you eaten?”

            “No,” she said, “I couldn’t.”

            “Well,” he said, but there was really nothing more to add.

            They went together into the kitchen, and without words gathered together some things for tea.  Rupert put on the kettle; Elisabeth dug into their Christmas provisions and pulled out a strong Cheddar and a wedge of buttery soft cheese.

            They took their tea in the dining room (Elisabeth nudged her laptop to the other end and pushed her books and notes messily after it): cheese, hunks of crusty French bread, an apple Rupert had sliced, and heavy mugs of strong black tea.  The meal felt oddly as if it were their first time facing one another across the board; they stole glances at one another, silently handed one another the cheese knife or pushed across a bit of apple.  There would have been little occasion to speak even if they had wanted to: as it turned out, weeping had given them a ravenous appetite.

            At last Elisabeth sat back, dropped her last crust of bread onto her plate, and heaved a sigh.  He put down his mug and sighed in agreement.

            “Shall I get the drinks?” Rupert asked after a moment, casting her a shy look.

            She gave him a little smile.  “Please.”

            She saw the reason for his shy look when he returned from the utility room bearing a wooden box and a small aged-looking bottle.  “I was saving these for Christmas,” he said softly, “but I think we may as well open them now.”

            In the box, Elisabeth found when he set it down, were four elegant balloon glasses nestled in fine straw.  And the bottle—

            “This appears,” she said, a slow smile curving her mouth as she smoothed the label, “to be an outrageously expensive Armagnac.”

            “That is because it is,” Rupert said archly.  “What d’you think: shall we partake?”

            “Let’s,” she said.

 

*

 

“You tore it up with Giles in the bookstore?” Buffy said.  “No wonder Elisabeth was pissed.”

            Brian grimaced.  “Well—yeah.  Though I felt pretty ill-used at the time, you know, because I came off worst—black eye and a fat lip, _and_ he got at my throat.”

            “Yeah,” Buffy said, “we all had some of that left over after the battle.”

            “That was what Elisabeth said—said I was a complete fool to pick a fight with a bloke who’d just been fighting demons.  But thinking didn’t really enter into it, you know.  I took care of her, you see, when she was—when she was so ill.  I didn’t do nearly as much as I should have, but he—he was making her—he was dragging her into his—”  Brian broke off.

            Buffy’s eyes were quiet and steady on his face.  “Yeah,” she said, “I get that.  I think some of the same thoughts were going through my mind when I punched Elisabeth across a graveyard.”

            Brian stared.

            “She didn’t tell you?...No, she wouldn’t’ve.  When I first met her, I was…suspicious.  I was just as anxious to protect Giles from Elisabeth as you were to protect Elisabeth from Giles.”

            “From Elisabeth?” Brian almost laughed.  “But she’s—she’s—”

            “—not exactly helpless,” Buffy finished for him.

            Brian dropped his gaze.  “I know.  That was what really made her angry with me, of course.”

            “Well, duh,” Buffy said, more comfortably.  She took another sip of ale. 

 

*

 

Rupert poured them each a snifter of the Armagnac, and watched while she held it up to the light and swirled it about the fine crystal.  When they each had a glass in hand, they looked at one another, attempting to form a toast: but what exactly were they toasting?  In the end they pledged one another silently and drank.

            She found him watching her furtively as she rolled the fine liquor over her tongue and swallowed.  “Well?” he said, unable to contain himself.

            For answer she finished off the little swallow and slid her glass across to him for more, and smiled.  As he refilled her glass, she asked, “So are we planning to save any of this, or are we going to drink it all?”

            He tilted the bottle to give it a calculating look before pouring his own portion.  “I could be prepared to drink it all, if you wanted to go that far.”

            “I’m game,” she said, and sipped appreciatively.  The Armagnac lanced along her tongue like chilled gold.  “It’s wonderful.”

            It went down as smoothly as it lay on the palate, warming her; for a long moment they were entirely occupied with swirling it, tasting it, taking in its scent.

            As she neared the end of her first glass, Elisabeth let her thoughts drift.  They were melancholy enough; but it wasn’t till Rupert spoke that she realized she’d been staring down the table at her abandoned work.

            “It’s not going well, is it?” he said.

            She woke to herself; sighed, and shook her head.  “Sometimes,” she said in a low voice, “I wonder if I’ve got what it takes.”

            “To finish your thesis?” Rupert asked, delicately.

            “To be an academic.”  She cast her gaze down into the gemlike clarity of the liquor in her glass.  “All I do is make hay out of my personal experiences—not—”

            “—spin it from gold?”

            Elisabeth gave him a brief smile.  “Like Rumpelstiltskin in reverse.  I fear it’s…I fear it’s one of those things the First used the truth to lie with.”  She looked away again.

            His reply was quiet.  “It said you weren’t worthy of academia?”

            “It did its best,” she said, “to convince me I was a sham in every respect.”

            A faint humor crept into Rupert’s tone:  “Like Antonio did to Isabella.”

            She snorted a laugh.  “‘More than our brother is our chastity.’  You’re not wrong.”  She flashed him a glance of renewed apology.  “And I see your point—I should ask who the real sham is in this equation….But it doesn’t do anything about—how tired I am.”  She stared hopelessly at her laptop, at the books piled higgledy-piggledy on the table.  “I wouldn’t even be still at it if some crazy Eccentric hadn’t ponied up an endowment to cover my scholarship….”  She stopped, staring inward.  Then turned to look sharply at him: he was gazing avidly down into his glass—confirmation enough, if any were needed.

            “It was you,” she said.  “You were the crazy Eccentric.”

            He made no answer at first; but as she waited he lifted tentative eyes to meet hers.  “Are you angry?” he asked, softly.

            She thought it over, meeting his gaze.  Finally she shook her head, and he relaxed.

            “Thank you,” she said.

            “You needn’t,” he said.  “I owed it to you.”

            “But, the thought,” she said—

            “—was Brian’s.  He insisted.”

            She fell silent, and waited for him to explain.

            “He phoned me and said,” Rupert told her, a wry smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, “that he didn’t care if the world ended that afternoon, I was going to make sure your future was secure.”

            Elisabeth was shaking her head even before he finished.  “That is so typical,” she said.

            Rupert said:  “I think you should let Brian off the hook.”

            She looked up quickly.  “You say that?”

            “I say that.  He’s your friend, and he loves you.  And he was quite right.”

            “I don’t want to be protected,” Elisabeth said, in halfhearted protest.  But—_She always avoids me when she’s upset_, she had heard Brian say on the phone to Buffy.  It was hard to ignore the pang of conscience: did she think having friends meant only ever being the steady one?  Especially when in practice she resented having to be so?

            “I think he knows that now,” Rupert said.  “He could have behaved quite differently over the exorcism business, you know.  He’ll do all right at our sort of work.  I’m satisfied.”

            _At our sort of work_, he had said.  She looked him in the face, half wanting to make him repeat it, to make him confirm that she belonged in his world.  But _You were made to give yourself_, she had told him, and that was all she, too, had to give.

            Elisabeth pushed forward her glass.  “I think I need some more,” she said.

            With a sympathetic smile he passed her the bottle.

 

*

 

“The trouble is,” Brian said, staring into his half-empty glass of ale, “the trouble is that I’m no bloody good at calculating.”

            Buffy finished off her own glass.  “I dunno.  You seem to do all right.”

            “Well,” he amended, “flying by the seat of one’s pants works fairly well for most things—but when it doesn’t, it really doesn’t.”  He hesitated, but went ahead anyway and told her the story of the girl-vampire he’d nearly taken to bed: how he’d scoffed at Elisabeth’s insistence on arming him with a cross and a stake early in their acquaintance, and received with private worry her lectures on the dangers of giving people verbal invites—only to wind up driving in a frenzy to London and showing up on Olivia’s doorstep still clutching the cross.  Elisabeth had gone into action with what seemed to him at the time a meditative curiosity, as how one might begin one’s first experiment with a chemistry set—performed the spell to seal his home against the monster, and dashed holy water over it when it came the next night for its prey.  Brian had not forgotten what it felt like to stake that girl-shape in the chest—the fear to strike at a human form, the explosion of the body into silent dust, and the frisson of evil that had gone through him as the demon passed.  When he looked up at Buffy he expected her to laugh at him, as Elisabeth had certainly done more and more with each telling of the story.  But Buffy’s eyes, fixed on his face, were grave.  It occurred to Brian that she must have heard countless stories like this one—only most of them not with happy endings.

            “Well,” she said, confirming his speculation, “you’re still here.  That’s something.  It’s the only thing, really, in the end.  My friend Xander—”

            “The pirate?  Yeah, I’ve met him,” Brian said, with a faint smile.

            Buffy looked startled, but recovered quickly.  “Well, then you know what I’m talking about.”

            “Is survival really all, d’you think?” Brian asked wistfully, after a moment of communion with the ale.  “Or is there no room for panache when it all burns up?”

            “Panache?” Buffy said, with a faint air of dejected bitterness.  “I was kinda worrying about moral fiber.”

            “Well, that, too, I suppose.  But don’t tell anybody I went around talking up morals.”  He grinned at her.

            At this Buffy did smile.  She had a nice smile—the mischievous highlight to her usual serious expression.

            “That reminds me,” she said.  “Anne told me to tell you to behave yourself.”

            “Damn,” Brian said, and Buffy laughed.

 

*

 

“I feel a bit stupid now,” Elisabeth said, resting her cheek on her hand and swirling her third glass of Armagnac.  “I don’t know what was stopping me from telling you all that I needed to tell you.  From this side it doesn’t seem worth all the big deal I made of it.”

            Rupert sighed.  “Well, if you’re stupid then so am I; I did the same thing.”  He lifted his glass, polished off the last swallow, and reached across the table for the bottle.

            “I mean, we are grownups, right?”

            “Supposedly,” he said, pouring.

            She gave him a lazy smile.  “Have I told you?  When I was little I thought that everybody got a little booklet or something when they reached a certain age, that told them how to behave like adults.”

            “Damn,” Rupert said.  “Then I missed getting mine.”

            She dissolved into a silent giggle, and he snickered.

            “It’s not funny, is it,” she said with a sigh.

            “No,” he replied.  Still smiling, he took a long sip at his glass.

            She looked up at him: eyes downcast into his glass, his expression had regained some of its lightly-held self-possession; the set of his shoulders again free of the habitual fear that plagued her own stance.  “Oh, Rupert,” she said, eyes stinging, “I missed you so.”

            At this he looked up; his eyes were still grieved, but she could read in them the humorous calm she had always trusted.  “It’s the more dreadful, is it not,” he said quietly, “that I was right here all the time?”

            “Yes.” She gave it to him in a rueful sigh.  “We lost all the comfort we once had in each other…well, except for….”

            Faint color came into his face, and he glanced down shyly.  “Bed,” he ventured, a little smile at his lips.

            “Yes.”  Elisabeth blushed.  They had never discussed bed when not in it.  She added, a little bolder:  “And that might have been better still if we hadn’t depended on it so much.”

            He raised his eyes to her and nodded.  “Or,” he said, “good in an entirely different way.”

            She was ruminating on what that entirely different way might be like, when he added, “A way I’d like to get to know.  With you.”

            She could not look at him:  a terrible happiness had taken hold of her, painful as the grief that had caused her drought of tears.  But then she came to a slight panic and looked up.  “Are you talking about…tonight?”

            “Oh God no,” Rupert said, and she started to laugh.  “I’m completely knackered.”  He looked over at her as she laughed, a rare open tenderness in his face.  “And seeing you smiling again is giving me happiness enough at present,” he added.

            She stopped laughing and mirrored his look back to him.  After a moment she lifted her glass, to finish it, and poured herself another.

 

*

 

“Want another?” Brian asked Buffy.

            “No thanks,” Buffy said.  “I’ve cut myself off.  I limit myself to one major drunkfest per visit to England, and I’ve already had it.”

            “Eh?”

            So Buffy had to tell him the story of the scotchfest, and, flushing, the sequel in which Elisabeth put them to bed together (“Oh Lord,” Brian said).  In return Brian told her a few stories about his youth in which alcohol played a significant part.  She told him how she’d made the acquaintance of beer and got in touch with her inner Neanderthal; Brian nearly fell out of his seat laughing.  When he heard the reason why she had been consoling herself with microbrews, Brian told her, “Nearly everyone has a fucker like that behind them.”

            “Including you?” Buffy asked.

            “We-ll,” he winced, “I may have _been_ that fucker a time or two, but I like to think I’ve grown up a bit.  I suppose I got what was coming to me with that female vampire.”

            “And you haven’t dated since,” Buffy said.

            “I didn’t say that!” Brian said.  “I’ve dated.”

            “Yeah,” Buffy said, very dryly.

            “And what about you then?”  Brian folded his arms.

            “Me?”  Buffy raised a hand and ticked off on her fingers.  “Vampire: lost his soul the only time we were together.  Id-boy, as Will calls him: God knows where he is.  Probably dead.  Military commando:  broke up with me.”

            “Cripes,” Brian said.

            “Then there was another souled vampire:  got immolated in the last battle.  I haven’t really ventured out much since then.  Casual dating and the Slayer: not very much with the mixing.”

            “The non-casual dating sounds harrowing enough.”

            “Tell me about it.”

            But Buffy seemed happier for having put her troublesome relationships in a laconic, humorous list.  In fact, she seemed altogether cheerful compared with how she looked when he had picked her up.  Brian was pleased.

            “After I finish this, shall I walk you home?  Though, hell, you’re the Slayer, probably you ought to be walking _me_ home.”

            “All right.”  Buffy smiled.

 

*

 

Elisabeth reached out a hand across the table.  Her movements were getting sketchy; Rupert, of course, looked fine.  He made no move to encourage her but looked pleased all the same when her finger reached his cheek and stroked it briefly.

            “D’you know what made me fall in love with you?” she asked him, smiling.

            He lifted his chin.  “My distinguished good looks?”

            She laughed at him.  “No, your distinguished good looks are why I went to bed with you.”

            He giggled.  Well, perhaps he _was_ a little bit less than sober.  Elisabeth was emboldened.  “I fell in _love_ with you,” she said, “because of your generosity.”

            He stopped giggling and fixed her with a slightly troubled look; Elisabeth hastened to reassure him.  “Oh not generous in _what_ you give me.  It’s yourself you give.  So few people do, you know.  No pretenses, no decoys, no false fronts, no skimpy measures.”  Even yet the words were doing no justice to her heart, no matter how she rephrased.

            He dropped his gaze.  “Well, I wouldn’t say I never try it on.  Especially lately.”

            “And you see how well that worked for you,” she said, and they both chuckled.  “No,” she went on, “you give yourself as a matter of course, mostly—and that made me trust you; and then you gave me even more, and that makes me…exalted.”

            He looked down at his empty glass with an unhappy little smile.  “God,” he said, “no wonder you thought you might have to leave.  Myself was the last thing I wanted to give you, since I came back.”

            “I know,” she said, in a small voice, and he looked up.  “But you’re still ahead of me.  I never do.  I haven’t got the knack for that kind of generosity.  I’m always afraid of going bankrupt if I give _anything_—affection, time, influence…moral high ground….”

            “It’s not an unreasonable fear,” he said gently.

            “No, but ‘whoever would save his life will lose it’—I belong to such an exasperating faith.  It wants me to do the very things I would avoid at any cost.”

            “And having such a fear,” he went on, “isn’t the same thing as succumbing to it.  Go on, I dare you: quote Carlyle.”  Rupert smiled.

            “Don’t laugh at me—it’s really frustrating.”

            He smiled wider.

            “What?” she demanded.

            “Nothing,” he said, “only—this is going to sound fearfully sentimental.”

            “Tonight’s the night for it,” she said dryly, and he made a face of agreement before going on.

            “It’s one thing that made me fall in love with _you_:  You fight.  You fight even angels and make them bless you.”

            “And sleep on pillows of stone to look for visions?” she said, amused, but he shook her amusement off, quite serious.

            “Not visions; truth.  Nothing less will satisfy you.  That is what _I_ trust.”

            “And why it scared you when I lied to you,” Elisabeth said, chastened.

            He nodded, and they met eyes on it for a moment.  Then he cleared his throat and reached for the bottle.  “Well,” he said, “we’ve knocked hell out of this Armagnac.  Do you want the last bit?”

            “Oh, no.  Any more and you’ll have to carry me up to bed over your shoulder.”

            “I suppose you’re right.  I’m not exactly up to being Rhett Butler in any sense.”

            “‘Frankly, my dear—’”  Elisabeth giggled.

            “—I don’t give a flying fuck,” Rupert said, pouring the last snifter into his own glass.  “Maybe you’ll have to carry _me_ upstairs.”

            “I think I saw the block and tackle in the conservatory.”

            “Fuck off,” he said, affectionately.

            “I’ll drink to that.”  She upended her glass and drained the last drops of liquor in the bottom.

 

*

 

“Well, thanks for the dinner and the beer,” Buffy said, on the doorstep of the flat.  She had unlocked and opened it, and the foyer light she’d left on shone out into the late-night chill.  Buffy thought that either she’d gotten used to the cold of England, or else she had plenty of alcohol charging through her bloodstream.  Probably the latter.

            Brian grinned.  “No problem.  I enjoyed it immensely.”

            “Kinda cheered me up too,” she admitted.  Across the street, someone’s Christmas lights blinked on and off, outlining their front window and giving the edges of Brian’s sandy hair a multicolored glow.

            His face went serious for a moment.  “Will you—you’ll call me, won’t you, if anything—”

            “I’ll let you know what goes down,” Buffy assured him.

            “Thanks.  Well, I suppose I’d better take myself off home….”  He gestured lamely at his car parked down the street.  But he continued to look at her, diffidently, without moving from his position one step below her.  At that level, he was only a little taller than she.

            Buffy understood clearly now why he was Elisabeth’s best friend, with his keen insight, his roguish humor—and his brisk honesty calculated to disarm all inequalities.  To his friends he would be solicitous, but never condescending or falsely worshipful.  It was damned refreshing, and Buffy appreciated it—appreciated him, with his languid tousled appeal.

            “Look—” It was dark, but she could tell he was flushing, all the same.  “As man to man—or man to woman, I should say, but it doesn’t have the same ring exactly—could I, under these particular circumstances—”

            Buffy gave one snorting note of laughter, took hold of his coat lapel, and kissed him.  After a brief moment she half pulled back to gauge his reaction.

            “Well,” he said, “that cuts to the chase rather nicely,” and kissed her back.

            He was a pleasant kisser, with a boyish eagerness tempered by mature art.  Buffy couldn’t remember ever having kissed someone simply for fun, without being surrounded by a cloud of earnest romance or a miasma of need.  He brought up a hand to support her elbow gently, and she leaned into him, just lightly enough to be comfortable.

            After a lingering moment of diffidence, he pursued the kiss more fully, and she responded in kind.  An honest warmth released her breathing, and as the kiss drew to its close and ended, she gave a sigh of unmitigated relief.

            Brian stepped back with a softened grin.  “Thank you,” he said.  “You have made a bloke very happy.”

            “Likewise,” she said, returning the grin.  “And—Brian—”

            “Yes?” he said, pausing in the act of turning away.

            “I wouldn’t let this slip to Giles if I were you.”

            “Do I look like an idiot?”

            Buffy laughed.  “No.”

            He grinned once more and started down the steps.  “Goodnight then.”

            “Goodnight.”

            Buffy turned and went into the flat, shutting the door gently behind her.

            It was high time she went to bed.  Tomorrow was Christmas Eve: and she hoped to God there’d be something to celebrate.

 

*

 

As it happened, Rupert did not need Elisabeth to get out the block and tackle or even support him up the stairs to bed.  But they both went up rather slowly, putting one numb foot carefully in front of the other and being extra solicitous of elbow and shoulder as they entered the bedroom and moved round one another to undress.

            But as they were getting into bed, as Elisabeth was reaching for her nightstand lamp, he turned to her with an altogether sober look.

            “Elisabeth?”

            “Yes?”

            “What should I do if you—if you dream again?”

            She stopped, completely blank.  “I—”

            “What do you want me to do?” he clarified.

            “I—” She stopped again and bit her lip.  “Do you think…do you think you could still hold me?”

            He hesitated a moment, and then nodded slowly.  “Yes.  I think I—I think I could do that.”

            “It really does help,” she said.  “And not because it makes me forget.  That was unkind.”

            “But honest,” he pointed out.

            “Yes,” she said, accepting the implied rebuke.  And added, “I promise to make you suffer.”

            He smiled, though sadly, at her echo of his words, and she turned out the light to settle down.

            “Are you sure you don’t need the light?” he asked, pausing in his reach toward his own nightstand.

            “Quite sure,” she said, wriggling into comfort under the covers.  “I have the country quiet and the stars; I have my own house and home; and I have you.”

            He turned out his light, and sank down to nestle under the covers, facing her as she faced him.  A twilight of wakefulness gathered between them, and he told her softly, in the darkness, some of the things he had told Buffy under the canopy of drink, things made now doubly safe to reveal in their homely darkness.  When she neither bridled in horror nor soothed him with platitudes, he relaxed, and spoke freely; and listened too to what she had to tell.  They grew sleepy; and as the night deepened, heavily shadowed in the dark of the moon, they drifted toward peace.  And neither of them knew who fell asleep first.


	11. The Dove Descending

_Whatever we inherit from the fortunate_

_We have taken from the defeated_

_What they had to leave us—a symbol:_

_A symbol perfected in death._

_And all shall be well and_

_All manner of thing shall be well_

_By the purification of the motive_

_In the ground of our beseeching._

_—_T. S. Eliot_, Four Quartets_

 

_He pretended not to watch her, keeping his eyes on the lane, and then on the road.  But he was acutely aware of the tremble of her fingers as she undid the top flap of her knapsack to search for ways to fit the plastic bag with her kimono inside.  Several neat tucks and pokes later, she reached for the ties of the cinch.  But the smooth-worn cord gave her trouble, and her hands shook worse._

_            She was fragile, and for a moment a horrifying hatred pierced him:  there was no reason to it, though there were plenty of reasons to be impatient, plenty of reasons to be angry.  The—surely it wasn’t emotion—passed, and the aftertaste of shame was strong._

_            Elisabeth conquered the cinch at last, and fastened her knapsack closed.  She sat back in the rickety seat, looking out the dusty window with a set face.  Rupert was seized with a sense of being trapped: if she wasn’t fragile, she was hurting him on purpose; if she was fragile, he had to go forward without her, without the respect of their partnership.  And if it was both—_

_            He couldn’t let a grief this strong flourish.  Not near _ _Willow_ _.  Not with—_

_            That was the other trap.  If she was right about the Harrowing, he did indeed have a hard fight ahead of him—they all did; and losing meant something worse than the end of the world, it meant utter pollution of the world Xander Harris had just recently saved._

_            If Elisabeth was wrong about the Harrowing, it meant…it meant she was simply leaving him, and it would be just like all the other times except this time he had had the opportunity to give his heart, and it wasn’t fair._

_            Well, he’d gone and done it now, he’d said the F word; how ridiculous.  Fair?  He was using the word _fair_ about love and war?  But why not complain?  The earth was constantly ringing with the complaints of lovers and combatants…._

_            Except for the lover and combatant who sat next to him in the car: silence, not complaint, rang in the air between them._

_            The little station came in view before Rupert was finished thinking.  He parked, and opened the door before the stillness could settle over and paralyze them.  Elisabeth followed suit, slowly, and started for the station house, hitching her knapsack over one shoulder._

_            Rupert waited on the platform.  It wasn’t quite deserted: there was a bored-looking trio of day-trippers occupying the sun-blistered bench.  He ignored them, dug in his jacket pocket, and lit a magisterial cigarette.  He could already hear the train coming._

_            Elisabeth emerged from the station house just as the train billowed in and pulled to a stop.  The doors opened, and a few travel-weary commuters descended heavily to the platform._

_            When the conductor appeared, the day-trippers, chatting and laughing among themselves, got up and drifted toward him; they paused briefly behind Elisabeth, but moved on around her when she did not budge._

_            She was staring at the train as if it were a monster appointed to eat her, and Rupert was again annoyed: if she was going to leave she should just fucking leave and have done with it.  Turning half away, he took a long drag on his cigarette, blew out the smoke, dropped it to the platform and put his foot on it._

_            Elisabeth stirred herself, and he looked at her._

_            “Thanks for the ride,” she said quietly._

_            He jerked a nod._

_            She shifted her ticket in her hand and began to move; suddenly he blurted:_

_            “Will I see you again?”_

_            She turned back to him a look of grave intensity that felt like a mirror to his own.  For a moment she said nothing, then:  “No one can tell me.  But that’s what I want.”_

_            Again she turned away, and had actually taken a few steps when, without thought, without plan, he found himself reaching after her.  Two long strides and a strong grasp, and he had pulled her round again.  He took her face hard in his hands and kissed her mouth, an ungentle kiss into which he poured all his love and all his fury._

_            She melted, but did not wilt: instead, she kissed him back, gripping with her free hand at his shirt.  She held him as firmly as if it were he doing the running away; and her touch spoke not of weakness but of scalding adamant._

_            When the kiss broke at last, he did not know who was releasing whom—had even lost his sense of gravity.  He fell back one ungainly pace as she fled for the doors of the train._

_            That, he thought, was the end of it, but no:  as he stood there, waiting more to reorient himself to the earth than to see the train out, his eyes focused again on the compartment window before him, and saw her face, half-obscured in the reflection of sky and platform.  Their eyes met through the glass; as the cries of the attendants gave way to the slow cry of metal pushing the train along out of the station, she put her hand to the glass, a gesture of both valediction and longing.  He raised his own hand in a feeble mirror of hers; the train pulled slowly past; and as he watched, it picked up speed till snakelike it had pulled all the way through the station and disappeared round the first bend._

_            Slowly, Rupert turned and made his way back to the car with deliberate strides, to return alone to the house._

 

*

 

Rupert turned over and woke to the grey morning light on the ceiling.  Beside him Elisabeth slept peacefully, curled away from him, embracing a plump pillow.  He could see the crest of her hand, resting childlike above her head.  It had not yet ceased to give him pleasure, to watch her enjoying creature comforts: she had not, as far as he could tell, been starved of pleasure, but it had always been pleasure of her own making, or bought secondhand, matter-of-factly stolen from a hostile world.  He remembered that state of mind, remembered what it was like to be a boy salvaging treasures from the debris of adult living.  But he didn’t know what this meant: did it mean Elisabeth hadn’t properly grown up, or did it mean that he had lost something vital since childhood?

            In any event, he had something to give her, and this was of value to him.

            At the moment, however, he was becoming aware of a faint sense of disillusionment.  People who aired their naked emotions were supposed to feel better: they weren’t supposed to wake up the morning after with a heavy ache over the breastbone and a case of psychological vertigo.  They weren’t supposed to be worrying that they might regret exposing themselves to the person they loved best, that they’d have lost face somehow or diminished themselves.

            Rupert rolled his eyes.  _Get a grip_, he thought at himself, and began to rise, quietly so as not to wake Elisabeth.

            Downstairs, he took a seat at the kitchen table to wait for the coffee to perk.  The cat appeared and leapt up on his robed lap to hunker in a comfortable curl, for once not begging him for food or egress.  Rupert’s hand found its way easily to the wide black ears, his fingers seeking out the soft place under the base.  The cat leaned into his gentle massage, and began a purr that Rupert felt more than heard.

            “Elisabeth says,” he said presently, with one silky ear between his fingers, “that cats with big ears are supposed to be good mousers.”  The cat turned his eyes to Rupert’s face.  “Suppose that means you and me,” Rupert said.  The cat winked both eyes at him and relaxed once more.

            Rupert leaned his head back, closing his eyes briefly.  He remembered the occasion on which Elisabeth had said that, remembered stroking her hair as she dropped off to sleep, weary from an unfathomable grief.  It occurred to him now how remarkable it was that she had not turned on him, not attacked him for being witness to her weakness.  She surely must have been tempted; and she surely must have had plenty of weapons at her disposal.  Though it would have been foolhardy, in Sunnydale, not to listen to her sense of self-preservation; and given a chance to walk away, she had taken it.

            Of course, she was far more dear to him now than she had been then; and she had so far recovered as to be stronger than he at several points along the way: this being one of them.  Rupert sighed.  It was probably one reason why she had presented such a noncommittal front to his churlish behavior; she probably knew that satisfying his urge to upset her would only have resulted in further guilt and resentment on his part.

            The coffee was done.  Rupert sat up, lifted the cat gently and put him on the floor as he rose.  The cat mirrored his yawn and stretch, and then began to rub against his shins and calves, herding him none-too-subtly in the direction of his dish.

            “Right then,” Rupert murmured, and opened the fridge for the half-can of cat food left over.

            Rupert took his coffee into the study and stood looking out the French doors, sipping it and curling his chilled toes within his slippers.  This was getting to be a habitual movement: in his new home, Rupert began to feel the variety within sameness that a morning ritual offered.  Yesterday he had stood here in the same spot, fearing more than feeling; today the fear had faded to the background, leaving the black cinders of feeling to claim his attention.  Perhaps, if he were lucky, he would stand here another day soon, pleased, or comfortable, or—_exalted_, Elisabeth had said last night.

            He heard movement in the house: Elisabeth, out of bed.  In the distance he heard the toilet flush, then the sleepy tread of her feet down the stairs.  In the kitchen a cupboard opened; water ran and the kettle rang hollowly.  “I see you’ve got _your_ breakfast,” he heard her say to the cat.

            Then her steps came his way.  He turned to look at the doorway, waiting for her to appear.  When she did, her face brightened into an unconscious smile at sight of him.

            “There you are,” she said.  “I’m having an egg for breakfast.  Want one?”

            He nodded dumbly, and she disappeared with a flip of her blue robe.

            She still brightened when she saw him—a casual, unwitting gesture that said as much as her words of the night before.  The hurt blindsided him; he turned again to look out the window, and drew a difficult breath.  Would there be a time when this didn’t revive the intense ache in his chest?

            Sighing, Rupert followed Elisabeth back to the kitchen, where he found her cracking eggs into a mixing bowl, the small skillet already on the range.

            “Shall I make the toast?” he said, with a small clear of the throat.

            She flashed him a quick grin.  “All right.”  As she beat the eggs in the bowl, she began to hum softly, a tune he gradually recognized as the _Sleepers wake_.  After she was finished scraping a large pat of butter into the skillet, he purloined the butter-dish from under her elbow and dropped two slices of bread into the toaster.

            Elisabeth skated the butter around the hot pan with one finger; she switched from humming the foundation melody to the Bach counterpoint.  For a moment, watching her pour the eggs over the snickeling hot butter, he felt a stab of envy at her undampened spirits.  But then he remembered the number of times she had trembled helplessly in his arms, made only the more uncomfortable by self-disclosure, and his envy dissolved.  He bent his attention with a will to the making of toast.

            Rupert set their places at the kitchen table, and put down the saucer stacked with toast; presently Elisabeth came with the pan and deposited them each a share of eggs onto their plates.  She got her mug of tea and they sat down together.

            He couldn’t help observing her again, as she cracked pepper generously over her eggs; the dark shadows under her eyes and the tucked-back corners of her mouth suggested that her peace, though real, had not come without its cost.  She looked up at him, and her eyes on his were damnably shrewd.  But she said nothing, and returned to piling her eggs on a slice of toast.

            It occurred to him that if what they were attempting was successful, hers was the face he’d be looking at across the breakfast table for the rest of his life, however long that was.  Slowly, Rupert fell to, meditating on this aspect of the thing.  If this was successful, they’d spend their lives doing just this, trading strengths, worrying over one another’s dangers, breaking one another’s hearts.  Could they do that?  Could they keep that balance?

            “So,” Elisabeth said, “what’s the plan for today, you think?”

            He jerked himself back to the present and cleared his throat.  “Well, one of us will have to go and fetch Buffy…probably better be me….”

            She raised her eyes gravely to his.  “Why don’t we both go.”

            He nodded, mute again.

            “Do you want the shower first?” she asked.

            He shook his head.  “No—you have it.”

            “’Kay.”  They returned to silent eating.

            But near the end of the meal, Elisabeth shifted uncomfortably in her chair, and braced one hand on the table edge; he looked up to see that she had lost color, and was biting her lip.

            “You all right?”

            She looked up.  “Yeah.  It’s just—” She opened her mouth as if to say more, but shut it again.

            “Yes?”  It was his turn to look gravely shrewd.  But he couldn’t guess what was on her mind.

            She tossed her head aside.  “I don’t…I would rather leave it unsaid.  But I probably shouldn’t.”

            “What?”  His voice was calm, but he felt a qualm in his stomach.

            “It’s just…I wanted you to know—that—”  She stopped, and started again, this time looking him in the face.  “We don’t know what’s going to happen.  Whatever it is, it’s probably going to be dangerous, knowing us.  I’m afraid—I’m afraid you might be thinking I’m not willing to…to make the big sacrifices, even in principle.  And—”

            He couldn’t bear to listen to any more.  “Elisabeth, what have we just been fighting about?  Don’t you understand how tired I am of you making noble sacrifices?”

            “That’s not what I’m talking about,” she said; then primmed her lips and let him have it between the eyes.  “I’m not talking about decisions _I_ might have to make.  I’m talking about you.  I’m talking about what happens if I get turned—or if I’m the only thing standing between you or Buffy and saving the world.  There’s no point saying it can’t happen, because—”

            “No.”  He shut his eyes and gripped the table hard.

            “Rupert—”

            He talked over her— “I can’t do it again.  _I can’t.  I won’t_.”

            “I’m not saying—”  But she fell silent.  When he opened his eyes at last, she had rested her forehead on her hand, elbow on the table.  “I’m sorry,” she said.  “I shouldn’t have brought it up.  It’s just that—”  She swallowed hard.

            “Do you think I’m that cool-headed, that I could just casually make a plan to—to kill—”

            “_No_,” she said, without lifting her head.  “I’m saying you shouldn’t have to agonize over what I’d want, if I’m unable to say.”

            He couldn’t answer; it was taking all his strength to keep his breath and his control.

            She went on.  “That was my mistake the last time.  I had the guts to leave you, but not to put any of our problem in your hands.  I…I lost your respect as a player—” she sighed, and he heard tears behind her voice— “and I might not get it back.”

            He sat silent.  Much as he wanted to refute it, he couldn’t.

            After a moment she dragged herself upright in her chair and smoothed back her hair.  When she looked up, he saw even more clearly the cost she had counted, in the steady lines of her face.

            “I don’t want a cheap grace for us,” she said.

            He swallowed, and found that he could speak.  “I don’t either.”  It came out hoarse, but firm.

            “I know you don’t,” she said, a faint humor tugging at her mouth.  “I’d have to be deaf and blind not to know it, with all the times you’ve tried to make me fight you.”

            So she knew.

            She took in a long breath and let it out in a great sigh, then rose with her plate and his.  “You know,” she said, “I think I might defer my shower till later, like before we go to the service.”

            “It’ll be dead cold then,” he said, “if the weather report is any good.  Your hair might freeze.”

            She turned a sudden smile over her shoulder.  “Good point.  I’ll borrow Buffy’s hairdryer.”  As the sink filled, she slid in the pan and her empty mug and, when he pushed it an inch across the table, his coffee cup.  He watched her hitch up the sleeves of her robe and take up the dishrag.  Presently, she began to hum the _Sleepers wake_ again, more softly than before: and this time he heard the acquiescent melancholy that twined with the joy, a Bachian Möbius strip; so characteristic, of both Bach and her.

            “I’ll have my shower, then,” Rupert said, rising.

            Steadily he went upstairs; steadily he found his bath towel, put on the bathroom heater and the shower, disrobed, and stepped into the hot spray.

            And it came for him again, as strong as nausea.  _You asked for truth, didn’t you?_  Rupert braced himself against the shining new tiles of the shower and tried to weep quietly.  When he was master of himself again, he put his face directly into the water for a long minute, and then began to wash, with a deliberation as acquiescent as Elisabeth’s.

            He looked himself calmly in the face, shaving; combed his hair, brushed his teeth.  With a chastened air he wrapped his robe round him and went back to the bedroom to dress.

            He found Elisabeth there, sitting on the side of the bed with her hands in her robed lap.  They shared a wordless gaze for a moment; then she reached out and patted the bed next to her.  With a sigh he came to sit next to her, hands braced lightly on his knees, eyes cast down.

            “What can I do?” Elisabeth said.

            He turned his face hard away, to compose his face and voice.  “There’s nothing to be done,” he said finally.

            She answered nothing, but he felt her acceptance; after a moment she curled both her hands over the crest of his shoulder and nuzzled his arm.  He turned to her then, and they reached to hold one another in an awkward embrace.  She offered him no more apologies; and he laid his cheek on her hair and let go, again, of the shame.  How many times would he need to do this?  Maybe it didn’t matter, not if she always called him back and back in just this way.

            “Why am I getting a déjà vu right now?” Elisabeth said, her ironic accents half-muffled against his shoulder.

            It didn’t take him long to remember.  “No worst, there is none?” he offered.

            She sighed.  “Oh, right.  We _have_ been here before.”

            “I was just thinking,” he said, “that we’ll probably be here again.”

            “I hope to God not soon,” she said.

            For answer he bent his head and kissed her ear.

 

*

 

It took Buffy a few minutes, but she did figure out how to get Elisabeth’s radio on and emitting Christmas music.  There, that was better: Christmas music, even at the frenetic pitch it always reached on Christmas Eve, was preferable by far to the silence of the flat.

            Buffy didn’t actually regret refraining from drinking too much the night before, but she did find herself thinking occasionally that Giles might have a point, and facing a rough day through a haze of scotch wasn’t such a bad idea.  She had tried to assure Brian that things would turn out all right, but in the cold—and she did mean cold—light of morning, it didn’t seem at all like a sure thing.  Methodically she packed the bag she’d brought the night before and made the bed she’d slept in.  With the radio on and blaring energetic pop versions of Christmas carols and cheesy Christmas versions of pop songs, Buffy found herself drawn into tidying the flat, which looked even more disheveled than it had when she arrived, the result of a week’s worth of raids for items needed at Pyke’s Lea.

            An odd sound crept into the tumble of music, a sound she recognized.  She dove for the radio, turned it off, then dug desperately in her bag for her cell.  Without pausing to see who it was, she flipped it open.  “Yes?”

            “Buffy, what did you do to him?” Willow demanded.

            “I didn’t do anything to—who?  Who are we talking about?”  Buffy stood up and caught her breath in the sudden silence of the flat.

            “Duh.  _Giles_.  What—”

            “I didn’t do anything to Giles,” Buffy said, indignantly.  “He’s fine.”

            “He’s not fine.  I can feel him from here.”

            Offense; offense was good.  “You said that before.  I thought you had the power to keep yourself to yourself,” she accused.

            “I do.  I did.  I—well, all right, I put out a couple feelers to _find out what’s going on_,” Willow said, with needle-sharp emphasis.

            “Well, I don’t _know_ exactly what’s going on,” Buffy said.  “I haven’t seen Giles for more than twenty-four hours, as a matter of fact.  So if anybody did anything to him, it wasn’t me.”  Buffy felt a sudden qualm of panic.  “He’s not…in danger, is he?”

            “No,” Willow said, “not danger.  Why aren’t you at his house?”

            “I’m at Elisabeth’s flat,” Buffy said, heaving a sigh.  “To give her and Giles some space to talk.”

            “Oh.”

            “So…,” Buffy said tentatively, digging her nails into her palm, “it didn’t go well?”

            “I don’t know about that,” Willow said.  “I just know somebody broke that piggy-bank of grief he’s been hiding under his mental bed.”

            “Well…yeah,” Buffy said with another sigh.  “That’s true.  He’s been big on the breaking things recently.”

            “Well, give,” Willow said.

            Somewhat chastened, Buffy opened her mouth to comply, but her phone beeped.  “Somebody’s calling me,” she told Willow.  “…It’s Giles.  I need to take this.  I’ll call you later.”

            “At the airport right now,” Willow said, pointedly.

            Buffy looked at the clock.  “Oh, right, I forgot.  Well, I’ll call you tomorrow then.  Promise.  Merry—whatever, and all that.  Bye.”  Without waiting for a response, she clicked over.  “Hello?”

            “Hey, Buffy, it’s me,” Elisabeth said.  “We’re on the road to Oxford.  We were thinking we’d pick you up for lunch and run a few errands.  Are you—?”

            “I’m dressed and ready,” Buffy said.

            “Excellent.  Then we won’t do the errands first.  Oh, and may I borrow your hairdryer later this evening?”

            “Uh—sure,” Buffy said, caught off guard.  She sat down, half-falling, on the bed.

            “Thanks—I’m going to have my bath just before we leave for the service this evening.”

            “So we still are going to the service then?”  Buffy grasped at the flimsy chance to get some information about Giles.

            “Oh, yes,” Elisabeth said.  “Plan’s still on.  —We’ll be there in a few.”

            “Okay.”  Slowly, Buffy lowered the phone and closed it, thinking.  If the plan was still on, that could mean several things.  It could mean that Elisabeth and Giles were okay, that they’d been able to settle their differences and move on.  But Willow’s reading seemed to suggest the other thing it could mean, which was that the disaster had been complete, and there was now no point in _not_ going ahead with the plan, because it was all over.  On the other hand, if it meant that, Buffy was sure she’d have heard it in Elisabeth’s voice; and all she’d heard was Elisabeth’s normal calm, dry timbre.  The only thing they couldn’t have done was defer the conflict to another time: there could be no more putting it off.  And no matter what they’d done, Giles’s piggy-bank of grief was broken, as Willow had said.  But Willow had implied, to continue the metaphor, that Giles was now spending his saved capital, and was still at it.  Dammit, it wasn’t fair.  Why did Willow have a better view into Giles’s state of mind than she did?  “Just because they fought with magicks,” she muttered to the bedroom, disgruntled.  “We did the Magick Hokey Pokey.”  She’d said it hopefully, but it came out sounding pathetic, so she gave a groan and dragged herself up from the bed.

            The problem was, she was jealous of the closeness she’d enjoyed with a man who was no earthly kin to her save by the manipulations of a patriarchal institution she’d rejected.  And Giles himself had implied that rejecting it completely meant rejecting him too.  He had as good as said _You can’t have your cake and eat it too, Buffy_.

            For the first time in a long time Buffy tried to imagine what being a Slayer would have been like without someone like Giles nearby—without an objective presence, without reassurance that what she was going through wasn’t crazy, that the huge power taking over her life had meaning, a good meaning.  Someone dedicated to a lifetime’s worth of supporting her, protecting her from the judgment of society, and—yes, loving her.  Someone who promised to put up with the heartbreak when she died, and who therefore would not be able to complain when it became clear that she wasn’t supposed to live to adulthood.

            Someone who, when it came down to it, did all that knowing he wasn’t as strong as she was.

            Buffy went listlessly to the window and looked out.  It wasn’t going to get solved quickly.  There was not, after all, some brilliant and perfect solution, some magic arrangement that would enable them to love one another without losing their integrity.  She’d already lost Angel to a situation like this; would she have to lose Giles too?

            A new instinct was making itself felt to Buffy: it was no longer the time to make firm stands.  This wasn’t like casting herself into a dimensional rip, or marshalling a force of Potentials.  It was now the time to unsnarl knotted necklaces: too hard a tug and the thing would break.  She would have to feel her way along.

            Outside, she saw Giles’s car nose its way into a gap in the street parking: and was seized with a sudden, fundamental fear.  She watched avidly as the car stilled, as the doors opened and Giles and Elisabeth got out.  Elisabeth held up her hands like a catcher’s mitt: Giles tossed her the keys over the car roof in a gentle parabola, but she winced at the last moment, and they fell through her hands to the pavement with an audible jingling smack.  Buffy saw the flash of Giles’s teeth in a smile.  He said something, and Elisabeth rose from retrieving the keys to give him a brief two-fingered salute.  Giles flashed her another grin.

            Maybe Willow was wrong, Buffy thought.  But the suspense was getting to be too much to take.

            With a brisk rattle of keys in the lock Elisabeth pushed into the house.  “We’re here!—Oh, you cleaned up in here.  That was nice of you.  Where are you?”

            “In here,” Buffy said, still watching Giles shut the car door and follow Elisabeth up the front steps.

            Elisabeth came into the bedroom.  “Hey,” she said.  “How you doing?”  Without waiting for the response, she went to the bureau and pulled the top drawer.

            “O…kay,” Buffy said, still off-balance.  “What about you?”

            “Doing all right,” Elisabeth answered, gathering something up out of a pile of socks.  She flashed Buffy a wink, just as Giles came in.

            “Hallo,” he said, leaning a shoulder against the doorframe.  “Care for a bite of lunch at the pub?”

            “Oh, well,” Buffy said, “I think I can stand to eat two pub meals in a row.”

            “Two?” Giles said, as Elisabeth unearthed a large flat object wrapped in brown paper from among her socks.

            “If your overnight bag’s packed,” she said to Buffy, smoothing down the brown paper, “we can stick it in the car on our way out.”  She maneuvered deftly around Giles and down the hall.

            “Two pub meals?” Giles persisted, as Buffy reached for her bag.

            “Yeah,” Buffy said, with a casual air, “I had a date with Brian last night.”

            “You _what?_” Giles straightened up from the door and scowled at her, a very satisfying response.

            “A platonic date,” she said as she moved past him to follow Elisabeth.

            “I should hope so,” Giles said, following her.

            “A date just oozing with platonicness,” Buffy said over her shoulder as they went out the door.

            Giles rolled his eyes in his patented lonsuffering gesture.  “Now you’re just teasing me.”  He pulled the door of the flat firmly shut after him.

            “We mostly talked about you.”  Buffy alighted on the sidewalk and fixed him with a look.

            “No doubt.  Elisabeth—toss me the keys.”

            With a quiet, wicked look, Elisabeth took aim and underhanded the keys up to him at the top of the steps.  He fumbled them, but managed to hold on, and Elisabeth gave him a pursed smile before bending to arrange her parcel in the back of the car.

            As they walked toward the Bridge, Buffy studied her companions closely for signs of either disaster or mending.  Giles and Elisabeth, however, were studying the weather, gesturing at the clouding sky and the chasing wind.  At first Buffy thought that this was an attempt at small talk; but as they crossed the Bridge into Oxford proper, she too began to notice that the sky and air had a look of something about to make a radical change—what, it was difficult to say.  The wind was cold, but when the sun came out by turns, its watery light cheered Buffy enough to feel her own warmth.

            Buffy took what opportunities she could to study their profiles as they walked, but Giles had his usual air of impenetrably vague aloofness, and Elisabeth looked grave but calm—not like a person who had uttered a cry of shame and despair thirty-six hours before.

            _Maybe I should take up spellwork again_, Buffy thought.  It sounded easier than taking up the verbal hammer and chisel.

            But as they approached the turning for their pub, Elisabeth suddenly slowed and turned to the others.  “You know,” she said, “I think I might slip down to the church and see how Anne’s getting on with the Christmas preparations.”

            “You don’t want lunch?” Giles asked her.

            “You guys go on; I’ll grab something.”  Elisabeth’s air of indecision vanished, and she felt briskly at her jacket pockets.  “Did I give you your phone back?”

            Giles slipped a hand into his pocket.  “Yes.  Have you got yours?”

            “Yeah,” Elisabeth said.  “I’ll call you in a bit and arrange a rendezvous.”

            Without wasting any more words, she set off briskly ahead, leaving them to take the turn for the pub.

            With only the two of them, it was easier to walk abreast.  Giles did not hurry his pace, even when the unruly wind picked up and flattened his hair upward.  Buffy was glad she’d put her hair up and out of the way.  “I think I’m getting used to English weather,” she said aloud, and Giles angled a little grin her way before reaching for the pub door.

            Inside, the weather was the topic of choice for nearly every conversation within earshot.  It was going to snow.  No, it wasn’t, it was going to ice.  No, it wasn’t, it was going to miss Oxford altogether and just be bloody cold.  Well, in any event the trains would certainly be fucked; don’t count on getting where you need to go on Christmas.  The trains were always fucked at Christmas, what was he talking about?

            “What’s a ploughman’s?” Buffy asked, frowning at the menu board.

            “Bread and cheese and pickle,” Giles answered.  “Comes with a salad here.”

            “Then I’ll have that,” Buffy said.

            They got their food (Giles had recommended that Buffy get cider with her choice), and Buffy paused in inspecting her plate to look at his.  Giles had a boat-shaped dish topped with puff pastry, and a generous dollop of a squashy green mass.

            “What,” she said, pointing with her fork, “is that?”

            “It’s mushy peas,” Giles said, with a telltale hint of mischief in his tone.  “Go on, try some.”  He pushed his plate forward.

            “Uh, no thanks.  I’m more concerned about _this_—” she indicated an amorphous dark glop on her own plate— “at the moment.  What is this?”

            “It’s the pickle.”  Giles was enjoying this game, she could tell.

            “Pickle!”

            “Yes, it’s the branston pickle.  What, did you think everything bearing the name of _pickle_ must be composed of small cucumbers and served from a jar of anemic green vinegar?  It’s good.  Try it.”

            Gingerly, Buffy prodded the branston pickle with her fork and gave it a taste.  It wasn’t bad; a little bit like chutney, but definitely English and weird.  Fortunately, the other things on the plate were less weird: two kinds of cheese, one Brie-ish, the other Cheddarish, a large hunk of thick brown bread, some fruit, and a small bowl of salad.

            Giles, meanwhile, had cut into his meat pie and was forking up a gravy-soaked bite of pastry.

            “So,” Buffy said casually, after they’d put in a good ten minutes of eating time.  “When exactly are you going to tell me about the sitch?”

            “What sitch.”  That he didn’t make a casual question out of it was, Buffy thought, a sign that he was not committed to shutting her out.  She hoped.

            “The sitch that led me to spend last night at the flat to leave you and Elisabeth alone.  The sitch that I spent three hours talking with Brian about in this pub last night.  The sitch you’re stonewalling me on right now.  That sitch.”

            “Oh, that sitch,” Giles said.  “Right.  There are so many sitches to keep track of, I was having trouble identifying which one you were referring to.”  He took a bite of mushy peas.

            “Giles, don’t be a smartass,” Buffy said.

            “I beg your pardon,” he said, lips twitching.

            “Willow called, just before you came.”  Buffy brought this out with a little twinge of secret trepidation.

            “Oh did she.”

            “Yeah.  She demanded to know what I’d done to you.”

            At this Giles did look up.  “What _you’d_ done?  Nobody’s done anything to me.”

            “Well, she was having a hard time otherwise explaining the magnitude of your not-fine-ness.”

            Giles made a face.  “Who asked her to play the nosey-parker with my vibes?”

            It was the same question she’d asked Willow herself, but it was time to turn the offense on Giles.  “Well, if you’d tell a girl what’s going on, she might have something to report, and Willow would be less likely to snoop.”

            “That is some very specious reasoning, Buffy,” Giles said, taking the high road.  Damn him.

            “Well, at least I got you to confirm that you’re not fine,” Buffy retorted.

            “_Which_ you already knew.”  Giles scraped the last bits of puff pastry from around the sides of the dish.

            Buffy cocked her head and gave him a look.  “Oh, come on, Giles,” she said, softer. 

            At last he met her eye.  “Honestly, Buffy, what don’t you know?  I’m not fine; I’m not dead.  There’s nothing to do but go forward.”

            _And Elisabeth?_ Buffy wanted to ask.  But the honesty of his eyes on hers made her say instead:  “Can I do anything?”

            He smiled: a smile which told her more than any words she could pry out of him; and it started an ache in her heart.  “You’re already doing it,” he said.

            She took a sip of her cider to ease the lump in her throat.  “You can do something else for me,” Giles added.

            She put down her cider glass; he was looking mischievous again.  “What?” she said, warily.

            “You can give me your branston pickle.  I hate seeing good food go to waste.”

            Buffy gave a great snort and pushed her plate across to him.

 

*

 

Elisabeth found Anne in the nave, wielding a screwdriver among the half-erected pew torchieres.  “Doesn’t the Altar Guild do that?” she asked.

            Anne looked up and flashed her a smile.  “The Altar Guild,” she said, “are all gone to pick up the flowers—and the candles, which got delivered to St. James’s by mistake.”

            “Tempt not the wrath of the Sons of Thunder,” Elisabeth said.

            “Indeed.” 

            “Can I help?” Elisabeth asked, tentatively.

            Anne sized her up.  “Why don’t you bring those glass cups and fasten them to the tops?...They’re the ones in that box there.”

            Elisabeth found the box, hefted it gently, and brought it over to the row of finished torchieres.  For ten minutes there was only the sound of their work in the unlit nave, the changeful daylight slanting through the windows, stained mosaic and grisaille.

            “I hear it might snow,” Anne said presently.

            “Oh, don’t get my hopes up,” Elisabeth said, and Anne laughed.

            “Dreaming of a white Christmas, are we?”

            “I can’t even remember the last white Christmas I saw,” Elisabeth said.

            “They’re not all that common round here,” Anne agreed.  “So where are Rupert and Buffy?”

            To pause was to betray.  “They’re having lunch down at the pub.”

            “And you’re not having lunch?”

            “I’m—I’m not—”  Elisabeth stopped, and sighed.  “I wanted to let them talk.”

            “What will you do for lunch then?”

            Elisabeth shrugged without looking round.  “I’ll grab something.”

            “You could grab half my sandwich,” Anne said.  “I haven’t eaten yet.”

            “Oh…I couldn’t….”  Elisabeth turned, and Anne gave her a look.

            “It’s a big sandwich,” she said.  “And there’s tea.”

            Elisabeth shut her mouth.

            Upstairs in Anne’s office, Elisabeth sat at the little table while Anne got out her lunch and divided it between them on a napkin.  She pressed the lever on the electric kettle, set a cup at each of their places, and then sat down herself.  “Which would you prefer?” she asked, holding up the box of teabags, “Earl Grey or Ceylon?”

            “Ceylon,” Elisabeth said.

            The impromptu lunch proceeded in a comfortable quiet, which was not what Elisabeth had originally come for, but which was as balm to her soul.  Her conscience had been troubling her about her tendency to come to Anne only when she was in need of help—and was this the obverse of her avoiding Brian on the same occasions?—and it was a relief to find that she could still sit down to lunch with her friend without being overcome by the guilt.

            “Thank you for feeding me,” she said.

            “You’ll be returning the favor tomorrow,” Anne said, pleasantly.  Then she looked up.  “We’re still on for tomorrow, I take it?”

            “Yes, plan’s still on,” Elisabeth told her, as she had told Buffy.  “We’re a go.”

            Of course, when giving this assurance to Buffy she had been able to get quickly off the phone and thus avoid the look she was now getting from Anne.

            “How is he?”  Anne asked.

            “He’ll be all right, I think.”  Elisabeth believed it more strongly than she had two hours ago, but she couldn’t bear to let her mind dwell on the topic.  She took a fortifying sip of her tea.

            “Did you get to talk?”

            Elisabeth looked up, preparing words to deflect her from the subject; but looking at Anne’s face, she realized that Anne was not asking out of teacherly detachment, or to draw her out for her own good.  Of course: Anne had dealt with Rupert yesterday in his shellshocked state; had involved herself deeply in their struggle; had probably carried more of the problem’s weight than either of them guessed.

            Elisabeth drew a long breath.  “Yes,” she said.  “We did.  Some.  Mostly we cried and drank Armagnac.”

            Anne said tentatively, “Would you call that…an auspicious development?”

            Elisabeth looked away and nodded.  “He…told me some of what happened to him.  And I, I told him the truth about my dreams.”  Her throat suddenly ached hard.  “It’s better to have the truth.  It is.  But….”

            Anne waited, eyes fixed sympathetically on her face.

            “He’s got to go through it,” Elisabeth said, getting hold of herself.  “I can’t do anything about it.  And I can’t…I can’t lie to him and pretend it doesn’t hurt me to watch him, but I can’t give him that to carry with everything else.”

            “Not all of it, certainly,” Anne said.

            Elisabeth looked up.  “I should let him carry a little, then?”

            “Well—” Anne hesitated— “can you trust him with a little of it?”

            Unexpectedly, grief rose in a wave and took her.  She pulled her glasses off to drop to the table, and put her hands over her face, nodding.  For a moment her very being was taut, impacted, with the release of isolation she’d imposed on herself since before the Plumbing Disaster: she had not known till this moment how much it had cost her to maintain her surface serenity.  It was a long minute before she could even get enough composure to whisper, “I’m—sorry—”

            “Don’t be stupid,” Anne said tartly.  “It’s about bloody time.”

            Elisabeth choked on a laugh.  She took her hands away to see Anne giving her a small wry smile.  She had not moved; but as Elisabeth started wiping her face with her hands, she reached over calmly and retrieved the box of tissues that stood on her desk.

            “D’you want to talk about it?” she asked.

            “Do you have time?” Elisabeth swiped at her nose with a skeptical sniff.

            Anne glanced thoughtfully at the clock above them.  “For the short version,” she said, with another small smile.  “Then I’d better get back to decorating.”

            Elisabeth gave her a tear-streaked smile.

 

*

 

Before she left Anne’s office, Elisabeth took out her phone and called Brian.

            He answered on the fifth ring, his “hello” very fragmented indeed.

            “Brian?  It’s Elisabeth….Where are you?  Why’s the signal so bad?”

            “I’m on the road?”  He sounded impatient.

            “On the road?” she repeated, stupidly.

            “To Manchester?”

            “Oh!  I forgot.  You’re going up to see your parents.  But you…you are still coming to have Christmas dinner with us.  Are you?”

            “Are you still having it?”  Even in the static, she could hear the utter dryness of his tone.

            “Yes, of course we—yes.  We’re still having it.”

            “Well, then, I’m coming.”

            Elisabeth sighed heavily.  “You’re mad at me.”

            “No, I’m not.”

            “Brian—”

            He gave a gusty sigh.  “All right.  Maybe a little.”

            “I heard what you said.  I mean, to Buffy.  On the phone.  About me avoiding you.  You…you’re not wrong about that.”

            There was a silence; Elisabeth wondered if the signal was breaking up, or if he was just that angry.  But then, “Well.  You haven’t always been able to trust me not to fly off the handle,” he said, in a low voice that reminded Elisabeth suddenly to breathe.

            She answered in the same tone.  “I owe you the chance, though.”

            “Then will you—will you tell me what happened?”

            Elisabeth opened her mouth, but he added, “When I get back to Oxford.  This signal sucks arse.”

            “Okay,” she said, relieved.  She wanted to tell him, but reliving the pain three times in one day was a bit much.

            “I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”

            “Okay.  Drive safe.”

            “I will.  Merry Christmas.”

            “You too.”

            “Cheers.”

            The signal ended.  Slowly, Elisabeth shut her phone and sighed, casting a desultory glance around Anne’s office.  Then she opened it back up, gathered herself, and hit the speed dial for Rupert’s cell.

 

*

 

Rupert shut off the stand mixer and gave the bowl a sniff.  He frowned, then dipped a spoon to taste.  More bourbon, he decided.  Then he’d add the rest of the cream.

            He had asked Elisabeth, uncertainly, whether it wasn’t overestimating their capacities to have eggnog _and_ mulled wine _and_ hot tea after the service, but the scent of the wine beginning to emanate from the crockpot, mingled with the taste of cream and sweet liquor, were filling his senses with holiday, and he decided she was right.

            Upstairs, he could hear Elisabeth and Buffy laughing and talking.  Elisabeth’s request to borrow Buffy’s hairdryer had turned into an offer by Buffy to do her hair; so now they were encamped in the bathroom with a multitude of feminine accoutrements.  Elisabeth did not often make such concessions to femininity, preferring a utilitarian approach to grooming and wardrobe; but on special occasions, he had discovered, she took great care and even pleasure in making herself smart.

            Rupert finished the eggnog and put it to chill in the fridge.  A whistling rattle of wind at the eaves reminded him to lay a fire in the kitchen fireplace, so he knelt to do so, then rose slowly and went upstairs, dusting his hands.

            “It smells good, Rupert,” Elisabeth called to him as he passed the bathroom.  He smiled, and continued into their bedroom to change his shirt.

            Fifteen minutes later, they convened in the foyer to don coats under the strings of white lights he and Buffy had hung.  Elisabeth buttoned herself snugly into her wool frock coat, tucking in a red scarf and raising the hood over the upswept hairdo Buffy had given her.  Buffy, however, shrugged herself into her fleece jacket and left it unzipped.  He gave her an amused look as he bundled up himself, but Buffy looked defiantly unconcerned, so he forbore to say anything, and caught up the car keys with a a faint whistle between his teeth.

            The wind had picked up to a keenness both of sound and cold as they went out to the car.  Rupert put the heater on, though it wouldn’t warm up properly till they arrived at the Oxford flat.  Which was more or less what happened: as soon as they parked and got out, the wind cut mercilessly into their clothing, and they all set off for the Bridge at a very brisk pace indeed.

            He smiled to himself as they reached the steps of the church and Buffy made for the door in a quick dart, visibly shivering.  He held the door as she let go of it, gesturing an older couple in ahead of him, and then followed himself where Buffy and Elisabeth had gone.

            The voices of the people around him were spiced with laughter, some of it very dryly aimed at the weather; the church smelled of fir needles and burning candles; ahead of him, Elisabeth was going up the nave, her head upraised in a gesture Rupert knew without having to look at her face.  He hung up his coat quickly and followed her and Buffy up the aisle.

            Elisabeth chose a pew in a spot he recognized as her usual choice—near the front on the left—and ushered them in before her.  As if they had done it every Sunday of their lives, Rupert sat down comfortably, laid his cap in his lap, took the order of service she handed him, and settled back while she knelt to pray.

            This was another thing he could expect to do many times, if their partnership held.  Rupert raised his eyes to the dark rafters of the nave overhead.  The nave, a ship of fools.  Two fools, at any rate.  Here at this moment, it felt like peace.

            On his other side, Buffy had sat down with rather less ease and was now looking around warily.  Her gaze settled on him, and he gave her a little smile.  He had not been with Buffy in a church for purposes of actual worship, that he recalled; this made a nice (if slightly ironic) novelty.

            The processional began, ringing and joyous; Rupert stood with the congregation and gave himself up to the service with the same spiritual motion he had used in the morning, embracing Elisabeth in their room.  The words and the music hit him with a shock like the dark sea at a cold sunrise bathe (it’d been a long time since he did that; too long), and he felt briefly as though he had barely managed to keep his feet, though outwardly his stance was calm and secure.

            By the time they all sat for the sermon, he felt primed and ready for what was coming: all the little candle flames in the church pointing the way to warm joy.  Anne rose and mounted the little steps to the pulpit, and he saw that when she made the sign of the cross, she finished it with an unconscious gesture—a gently cupped hand as if receiving and giving both at once.  He smiled and glanced over at Elisabeth: she was sitting up, her shoulders set forward in the academic’s attitude of attention, her eyes fixed rapt on the priest.

            _Sing to the Lord a new song_…_proclaim the good news of his salvation from day to day_.  Christmas, more than anything else, Anne said, was a celebration of time.  God will save us; God has saved us; God saves us right now.  The news always comes as a shock; though we know the victory has already happened, we see little to encourage us, little to promise us that our efforts to live by that invisible victory will bear any fruit.  But we must remember, Anne said, that it is grace that sews together the fabric of past, present, and future; grace, not threat, that makes us able to live as we should right now.

            Without turning her head or changing expression, Elisabeth reached into his lap and took his hand.  Rupert responded in kind, and they sat like that for the rest of the sermon, listening together.

            They released one another at the offertory anthem, which was (Rupert smiled to himself) Bach.  A Magnificat, though he couldn’t remember which one.  He sat, letting his gaze drop focus, and let the ribbons of music draw his thoughts.  Beside him he could feel Elisabeth, equally unmoving, listening with every fiber.  From her to Bach, from Bach to Mary, from Mary to the icon Anne had given Elisabeth…._He has mercy on those who fear him in every generation_….

            Generations; on his other side the no-longer-one-girl-in-every-generation was lost in her own thoughts.  As they rose for the eucharistic prayers, Rupert nudged her, and Buffy, startled, got belatedly to her feet.

            It no longer seemed to him anomalous, what he was doing: watching Elisabeth genuflect and go forward, he felt as if (to use Anne’s metaphor) the grace of the moment had pulled a stitch gently taut, between the world he had worked so hard to save, and his living in it.  And Elisabeth, her face closed in prayer, radiated a gratitude as she returned to them that lifted his heart.

            There were more hymns as communion ended, finishing with “Silent Night”; then they rose again, and the organ pealed into “Joy to the World”.  Every voice was lifted to a near-shout as the altar party recessed, Rupert wholeheartedly included, and as the congregation was dismissed, the voices broke into greetings and laughter.

            Still taking it all in, he moved into the aisle, letting Buffy and Elisabeth edge in behind him, bantering along with everyone else.  He led them down to the doors of the narthex, where the priest was shaking hand after hand and laughing.  She took his before she really saw him, and then she smiled.  “Happy Christmas!” she said through the din.

            “Happy Christmas,” he replied in a low shout.  “You still coming to the house tomorrow?”

            “Of course!  Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”  Anne was growing hoarse, so he moved on to get their coats while Anne shook Elisabeth’s and Buffy’s hands.  When they followed him into the narthex, he held Elisabeth’s coat up for her to shrug into, which she did, casting him a sidelong smile.

            The three of them stumbled out into the cold; their fellow churchgoers stumbled out with and around them, and dispersed into the night, laughing on their way to warm homes and Christmas cheer.  Behind him, Rupert could hear Elisabeth chivvying Buffy with a maternal note in her voice that made him nip a smile in the bud:  “Here, have my gloves.  No, take them.  Really!”

            Rupert looked up into the close clouds overhead.  The lights of Oxford made them gravid with orange light, so that the night’s darkness was mere shadow.  Unless he was mistaken, they were about to get snow after all.

            He turned to Buffy and Elisabeth, smiling.  “Well,” he said, “shall we go home?”

 

*

 

Elisabeth was waked from a drowsing sleep by the faint sound of snow against their bedroom window.  Behind her Rupert lay close, sleeping soundly.  For a long minute she lay quiet, feeling the security of their warm covers against the drafts of the house and the near-silent wildness of the night outside.  Inside, she was still well-fortified with mulled wine and Rupert’s eggnog, and come to think of it, she was probably going to have to venture outside their nest to visit the bathroom.  But before stirring, she closed her eyes for a moment and savored the images of the evening: the wonder of the service, the snow that began as they drove home, the glint of Rupert’s glasses in the kitchen firelight as he bent over his guitar to pick out carols.  There had been “Lo, How A Rose E’er Blooming” (as she peered out the diamond-paned windows at the accumulating snow for the umpteenth time) and “The Holly and the Ivy,” and “I Saw Three Ships” and “Once in Royal David’s City”.  Then Buffy had asked for “Away in a Manger” and “The First Noel,” which she sang with wine-induced gusto.  They finished with “Silent Night” again: Elisabeth and Rupert traded off on the harmony verse by verse till he let the guitar fall silent, and all of them sat quiet and replete, ready at last to go to bed.

            Elisabeth opened her eyes and eased gently out of bed to pad out to the bathroom.  When she returned, she couldn’t resist going to the window again, to watch the snow come down.  She fingered aside the muslin curtain and looked out to see a transformed Pyke’s Lea.

            She thought, not for the first time that night, how good it was to be here, in this house, at Christmas.  This was the first Christmas she had spent in this dimension that bore any resemblance to those she had once known with her family: she missed them, and she felt them a little, and which caused which she could not tell.  And now that she and Rupert had been uncemented from their fear, the more ordinary fears of beginning a new family with someone had come to the fore; and the joys too.

            But she was not the only one awake tonight.  Below, in the front garden by the orchard, she saw a figure moving under the shifting swirl of falling snow.  The figure was gathering snow from the ground and launching it in graceful missiles:  Buffy.  There seemed something angry, something desperate, in her movements, and for a moment Elisabeth felt a qualm of unease; but there was deliberate method too, and she remembered how little time Buffy had had to herself, to work things out without constantly being focused on threat.  Too, it couldn’t have been comfortable dealing with the crisis between herself and Rupert, whichever way it would have turned out.

            Behind her, Rupert stirred in the bed.  She heard him pause as he realized she wasn’t with him; then he turned over.  “Elisabeth, it’s only snow,” he said, in a petulant moan.  “Come back to bed.  It’s cold.”

            “Buffy’s out there,” Elisabeth said.

            A pause.  “Is she okay?”

            Below, Buffy had stopped throwing snow and spread her arms and head back to meet the oncoming flakes.  Elisabeth watched a moment, and said, belatedly:  “Yes.”

            “’s cold,” Rupert repeated.

            He couldn’t see her smile in the dark.  Sedately, Elisabeth moved back round to her side of the bed and crawled in to curl where she had been before, though the spot had long since grown cold.  With a small sigh Rupert nestled against her back, threading the covers over her shoulder; she relaxed into him and closed her eyes as their combined warmth spread through their nest.

            The wind sharpened briefly, and Elisabeth, comforted by the sound of snow dashed against her window, fell asleep.

 

*

 

Light, implacable and pale, brought Rupert awake.  The first thing he saw was Elisabeth’s face, eyes calm shut and chin tucked down; she had turned over to face him and was now curled down at the bottom of her pillow.  A strand of her hair lay forward over her brow and across the pillow; unable to resist, he stirred a hand free of the covers and smoothed it back with sleepy fingertips.  At his touch she took in a sudden deep breath and smiled without opening her eyes.  He touched the smile, upper lip, lower lip, and corner, and moved his finger to smooth her hair behind her ear.

            She smiled wider.  “Merry Christmas,” she murmured, eyes still shut.

            He cleared his throat gently.  “Merry Christmas.”

            “What time is it?”

            He lifted his head to squint at the clock on her nightstand.  “Little after eight,” he answered, putting his head back down closer to hers.

            “Mm.” Her eyes fluttered open.  “’s bright out.”

            “Snow,” he said, and she nodded.

            His fingertip traveled gently up and over to stroke the round of her shoulder where her shirt had rucked up.  She met his eye, full awake now, and moved her hand under the covers to touch him in return. 

            “Thank you for last night,” she said.  Her hand smoothed down the rumples of his T-shirt over his side, and then again: a gesture of affection.

            He smiled.  “Thank _you_.”

            She inched closer to him.  “So, what’s the plan for this morning?” she said.  “Breakfast, then presents?”

            He couldn’t help a little grin.  “Presents?”

            “Of course presents,” she said.  “What, did you think you weren’t getting any?”

            “Well,” he said, “it’s safer not to assume.”

            “Oh, bah, humbug,” she said.  She was looking him directly in the eye now, and her fingers below were easing under the elastic of his boxers.  He narrowed his eyes at her, but couldn’t stop his lips from twitching.  She moved closer to him as her hand curled round in a soft grip, the expression in her face gravely flirtatious which was in itself liable to stir his pulses.

            “So, Rupert,” she said.  (Her thumb moved, again and again in long slow strokes.)  “Have you been a good boy this year?”

            “No,” he answered honestly.  For a brief second their eyes met on it, then her lips twitched into a fresh smile.

            “Well,” she said, “honesty has its own rewards.”  And she ducked from under his hand on her shoulder and slid beneath the covers.

            He submitted to her gentle efforts to expose him to her; and was more than ready when she’d got his boxers down to his knees: the warm touch of her breath on his skin, the breath-stealing caress of her lips and tongue—

            It was exactly what he wanted, but he also wanted something else: he wanted to hold her, to feel her close and meet her eyes again.  He found himself reaching down to find her shoulder and stop her: she stopped, and with his fingertips he urged her upward.  He turned onto his back and she crawled up over him; her face as she emerged from the covers was concerned.

            “What’s wrong?” she said, gently.

            He shook his head, for a moment at a loss for words.  It wasn’t till he had his arms round her and she had laid her smooth cheek against his rough one that he murmured:  “I want to hold you.”

            To his relief there was a smile in her voice when she replied.  “Never knew you to turn one of those down before.”

            “It’s not generally likely,” he admitted, shutting his eyes in a brief grin.

            She raised her head to look at him; he stroked back her hair.

            “I remember the first time you did it,” he said.

            She chuckled and laid her head back down again.  “You were so astonished.”

            He had to laugh.  “I was.”

            “When exactly was that?  I’ve forgotten.”

            “The second time I came to you,” he said promptly, “and we ran out of condoms.”

            He felt her laughing.  “Oh, of course.”

            “I was just searching for a diplomatic way to make a tentative suggestion, and you gave me this little look, and went right down.”

            “Took me a little while to develop a technique.”

            “It’s a very good technique,” he said reverently, and she laughed again and kissed the angle of his jaw.

            He shut his eyes and stirred her hair with his fingers.  Yes, this was threading the needle of what he wanted. 

            And she, too, wanted something: her hands came awake to explore him beneath her, to find the hem of his T-shirt.  He moved his head to kiss her hair; in response she put her lips to his ear.  “If you don’t want to be sucked,” she murmured, “what _do_ you want?”

            “It’s terribly conventional, I’m afraid,” he said, his breath quickening.

            “Rupert: this is Christmas.  The most conventional public holiday of the year.”  He caught a flash of her hazel eyes before she pressed a delicate kiss to his jaw.  She dropped her voice to a whisper.  “What do you want?”

            “I want…you to hold me.”

            Accordingly she rolled away and drew him with her, so that they finished up with him nestled upon her; for a moment he laid his head down on her breast and rode the swell of her breath.

            “Anything else?” she said.  He raised his head: there was mischief in her face, and he returned the expression, pursing a small narrow grin.

            “I want to be in you.”

            “I think we can do that,” she said, gravely.  “Anything else?”

            He rose up, so that their faces were close, and held her eyes.  “Oh, a number of things,” he murmured.  “I’ll tell them to you.  One by one.”

            She drew a sudden, shivery breath and smiled: all the answer he wanted.

 

*

 

“Just five more minutes,” Buffy muttered, burying her face harder in the pillow.

            But the paw was insistent, dragging at the covers till they fell away from her shoulder.

            “Aw, come on,” she groaned.

            “Hrmnow,” the cat said.

            Buffy gave up.  “Fine.  Fine!”  She turned over.  “Merry Christmas to you too.”

            He started purring in her face, looking way too satisfied.

            Buffy sat up and stretched.  From the window was coming a strong white light; with a yawn she got up to investigate, pulling aside the light curtain.

            Her window panes were edged with snow, a phenomenon she had never seen outside those cheesy Christmas cards, and the orchard was blanketed with a smooth breast of white.  Peering closely, she saw that the disturbance she had made in the night was almost completely covered over; it must have snowed steadily almost till morning.  It was still cloudy, but the clouds were light and visibly in motion; as she watched, a breeze trembled the bare branches of the orchard trees, and snow dropped to the drifts below.

            “It’s all Bing Crosby out there,” she told the cat.

            She yawned again, pulled on the borrowed cardigan, shoved her feet into some socks, and headed downstairs.  On her way she saw that the door to Giles’ and Elisabeth’s bedroom was standing open: the bed was empty, unmade and rumpled.  Good.  Maybe there’d be coffee on.

            Giles was sitting at the kitchen table when she came in, one finger loose in a coffee cup handle.  Behind his chair Elisabeth stood with one hand on his shoulder; the other he had covered with his where it rested against his robed chest.  His head was tilted back, her lips buried in his hair, both their eyes closed; and they were at rest, perfectly still except for their breathing.

            Buffy stopped in her tracks, her “Merry Christmas” dead on her lips; she was about to tiptoe away, but Elisabeth’s eyes blinked open and saw her.  She raised her head and smiled.

            “Good morning,” she said.  “Merry Christmas.  Want some coffee?”

            She was about to demur, but then Giles opened his eyes too.  “Merry Christmas, Buffy,” he said, with that not-quite-smile of his.

            “Merry Christmas,” she said to both of them, and went to get herself a coffee cup.

 

*

 

The forenoon unfolded gently: they ate breakfast, cleared and reset the table for dinner, got cleaned up and dressed, and set about with the cooking.  Elisabeth and Buffy made a salad, to be tossed and dressed later, then stirred up a casserole; Rupert busied himself with putting in the beef roast and making pastry.  When no more damage could be done in the kitchen, they left things to bake and went outside to play in the snow.

            Elisabeth sat up from making a snow angel just in time to see Buffy paste Rupert in the back of the head with a snowball.  He let out a cry of shock and indignation, and turned quickly to retaliate.  Elisabeth rolled to her feet, shedding snow, and scooped up ammo for a snowball of her own.  Hers missed him; he whirled and shouted, “No fair!”—then ducked, barely missing Buffy’s next missile.

            They were losing breath with laughing when they heard Brian’s car plowing its way gingerly up the lane.  As it trundled toward them, Elisabeth murmured to Buffy beside her, “Now we’ll see how it went with his parents last night.”

            “Oh yeah?”

            “Yeah.  Take note:  if his accent sounds extra Manchester it was okay; but if he pulls out all the Oxford stops, don’t even ask.”

            Buffy grinned.  “Right.”  She bent to make another snowball.

            The car plowed to a stop.  The driver door pushed open and Brian got out, holding up a bottle with a ribbon round its neck.  He lifted his voice to shout at them.

            “Hey up, I’ve got—”  That was when Buffy’s snowball took him neatly across the top of the head, knocking off his cap.  Elisabeth staggered over a few steps laughing at the openmouthed look of him staring at his cap on the snowy ground.  Then he looked up at the both of them with an expression of war.  “Oh, right, _then_,” he said, and put the bottle back in the car.

            The passenger door opened, and Anne got out into the snow.  She had no cap to knock off, but wore a thick red muffler and her windbreaker.  “Looks like you got your white Christmas after all,” she called to Elisabeth.

            “Boys against girls!” Buffy cried, bending down for more snow.

            “What!” Brian was indignant.  “There’s three of you and two of us, and one of _you_’s a Slayer!  How fair is _that_?”  He would have said more, but stopped instead to duck behind the still-open door to avoid another potent Slayer snowball.

            “You’ve got bigger hands,” Buffy said, as Anne laughed and darted across to where they were.

            “It was never going to be fair, you know,” Rupert said.  Brian gave him a hard-pounding-this-gentlemen look and shucked off his coat with alacrity.

            The sun came out as they warred, turning the breast of snow to diamond where they had not disturbed it for ammunition or retreat.  They were quickly sunblinded, and presently Rupert called a halt so that he could go in and check on his pastry.  Brian retrieved his wine and coat from the car, and they all trooped inside, their socks wet and their clothing coated with grains of melting snow.  Anne pulled off her trailing muffler and shook snow out of her hair.

            “Didn’t get you too rough, did I?” Brian inquired solicitously.

            “Of course not,” Anne said, and, “You wish,” Buffy said at the same moment.

            Elisabeth darted upstairs to get everyone dry socks, shaking her head to clear the green retina-burn from her vision.  When she came back, Rupert had donned his apron, and Brian had anchored his bottle between his shoes and was busily manning the corkscrew.

            Getting dinner on the table was an easy chore with five of them to share it.  The kitchen was large enough for them to meander in and out carrying things, getting one another’s wine glasses mixed up, telling stories and laughing (Brian had them in stitches about the disastrous flaming pudding of 1984 and his grandmother’s laconic response—“Ee, it’s not a proper Christmas without the fire brigade, now, is it?” and Buffy and Elisabeth exchanged looks); and by the time everything was on the table and they were each standing behind the chair they would occupy, Elisabeth found herself drawing deep breaths of gratitude: _this_ was what she had wanted for Christmas.  At the other end of the table, Rupert glanced expectantly over at Anne; she in turn looked over at the others and found them also looking at her, so she said promptly, “Thanks be to God for these and all God’s mercies,” and everyone said, “Amen.”  Without waiting any longer, they all sat down to dig in, laughing at nothing in particular.

            It was very good food, and there was a lot of it.  They passed helpings and second helpings, and told stories between bites, and joked with one another.  When they began to sit back, groaning pleasantly, Elisabeth suggested serving out coffee and dessert, but, “Oh, no,” Brian moaned.  “Wait till I can do justice to it.”

            “Well, then,” Buffy suggested, “let’s open presents.”

            Elisabeth laughed.  “Oh, of course.  Presents!  How could I forget?”

            “Ours are in the boot of my car,” Brian said.  “I’ll go and get them.” 

He rose, and Buffy said, “I’ll help.” 

“Where are we going to open them?  The study?” Brian said, half-turning to Elisabeth as Buffy pulled her napkin from her lap and pushed back her chair.

            “There isn’t any furniture in there yet,” Rupert said.  “But there are chairs and a fire in the kitchen.”

            “I’ll start clearing the table in there.”  Anne rose briskly.

            “Good idea,” Elisabeth said.

            But as she was about to follow Anne into the kitchen, Rupert captured her hand and drew her away with him in the opposite direction.

            “Come here,” he said, pulling her into the conservatory, which was filled with the pale, cold light of all the snow outside the windows.  The day had waned, and the shadows of the snowdrifts were turning a deep, delicate blue.

            Rupert opened one of his toolboxes and brought out a smallish bundle.  “I wanted to give you this alone,” he said, unwrapping the outer layer of oilcloth and presenting to her a package wrapped thickly in tissue paper.

            “An oblong shape with square edges,” Elisabeth said as she accepted it.  “My, what could it be?”  She smiled up at him, but his faint expression of diffident anxiety did not alter.

            Gently, she worked a thumb under the edge of the wrapping and tore it away layer by layer.  It was a book, of course, but as she uncovered it she found that the cover was smooth, supple and bowed in the way only well-cared-for vellum could be: not just any book.  She smoothed the tissue away from a ridged spine and let it fall away to the floor.  As she did so, the pages fanned briefly and she caught a glimpse of gold and blue paint.

            “Oh, Rupert, you didn’t!” she breathed—a brief, startled glance upward caught a smile beginning to edge into his face—and leafed the book gently open.

            Even as her bookscout’s mind noted the features—vellum cover and pages; written, not printed manuscript; language English and Latin; content, Book of Hours—her eyes stung.

            “You can’t _find_ these in this condition anymore!” she said, cradling the spine in her hand and tickling the pages further open to view the details of the illuminations.

            “No,” he agreed.  “—Well, it’s very difficult.”

            She looked up.  “You didn’t trade a favor from a demon for this, did you?”

            “Not a demon, no.”  He smiled wider.

            Elisabeth closed the book gently and went up on tiptoe to kiss him.  His hand found her free one and clasped it.

            That was how Buffy found them three minutes later, when she bounded into the back hall.  “Hey, you guys, we’re starting to—oops.  Should have interpreted that get-a-room quiet a little better, huh.”

            They broke apart laughing; Rupert said with an indulgent glare, “We _did_ get a room, thank you.”

            Buffy shot them a wry grin.  “Come on, you two.”

            They came, grinning sheepishly.

 

*

 

Buffy, Anne, and Brian had piled all the gifts on the kitchen table, and Anne had started the coffee pot.  As he went to the counter to unwrap the pie and pastry, Rupert watched from the corner of his eye as Elisabeth sat down next to Anne at the hearth and began, with a shy enthusiasm, to show her his gift.  He had known she would like it: but he was relieved to the pitch of hosanna all the same.

            Buffy sat by the pile of gifts and passed them to their recipients one at a time; each gift was opened while the others, pie saucer on knee and coffee in hand, watched.  Elisabeth opened a gift from Buffy—an opulent but light pajama set in a rich French blue, with slippers to match; Anne gave Elisabeth and Rupert a large electric kettle for the house; Buffy passed Brian a very heavy gift from Elisabeth which turned out to be Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_—“all six bloody volumes, and you had to rub it in, didn’t you?” he said; she grinned, and he leaned over to kiss the side of her head.  Rupert took a serene sip of his coffee and felt himself very magnanimous.

            Buffy passed Rupert a gift, wrapped in a semi-large clothing box.  “That one’s mine,” Elisabeth said.  “I’m afraid it’s not anywhere near as nice as what you got me.”

            If they had been alone Rupert would have made reference to a number of spectacular things which she had already given him, but as it was he contented himself with casting her a veiled look across the way—which she read perfectly and returned.

            Rupert unwrapped the box and opened it.  Inside, in a nest of tissue paper, was a selection of shirts: one with a blue stripe, one a warm ivory, one a solid pale blue; and a very soft sweater of a grey that edged on green.  He looked up to smile at her.

            “There’s more,” she said.

            Indeed there was: underneath the sweater was a book, a book he recognized.  _A Short Listing of Tripedal Ritualists_.  He dropped his head in a silent laugh.

            “Look inside,” Elisabeth said, so he opened the front cover to find that she had laid in a note.  _This book is representative of the collection to which it belongs: which you shall dispose of as it pleases you_.

            He stopped laughing.  After a moment he looked up, wet-eyed, and said softly, “Oh, Elisabeth.”  He recognized the dry twist to her mouth that meant she was holding emotion in check, and he said to her eyes, “It will be ours.”

            She relaxed into a bright-eyed smile.

            There were more gifts after that; Buffy had thoughtfully given him a hammer:  “I thought about getting you a sword, but I thought you were more in a building-things place, so I called Xander and asked for his input.”  The hammer was clearly one meant for carpenters, and very high quality; along with it, Buffy had given him a small teak box carrying herbs he recognized as useful for spells of creation (“Willow’s idea,” Buffy said), and an Italian cookbook written in Italian (“Dawn and I picked that out,” Buffy said).  In his turn Rupert watched Buffy open his gift, which was an old-fashioned pocket watch, wrapped in a fluffy warm red scarf: Buffy made a moue-face at him, but then smiled gently, which told him that the message was not lost on her.

            It was full night when Brian and Anne began to get ready to go home.  “Are you sure you can make it?” Elisabeth said, concerned.  “I mean, if the roads are bad we can make shift to put you up for the night.”

            “No, no,” Brian assured her, “it’s only the lane that’s difficult.”

            “I could have driven my own little car,” Anne said, “had I but known it.”

            Thus reassured, Elisabeth let them go, carrying away their gifts and wishing Merry Christmases all down the walk.  As he shut the door, Rupert caught Buffy behind him stifling a yawn.  “Tired?” he asked.

            “Yeah,” Buffy admitted.  “I think I’m going to go straight to bed.”

            “Did somebody say ‘bed’?” Elisabeth said, coming out of the kitchen with her book, which she had rewrapped in the oilcloth.  “That sounds much more appealing than washing dishes, I have to say.” 

Rupert groaned in agreement.  “Let’s do that tomorrow,” he said.

Elisabeth went down the hall toward the study, singing softly, “On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me….”  He turned his gaze from her to Buffy, who was smiling gently at him under the fairy lights.

“Merry Christmas, Giles,” she said.

“And to you,” he said, smiling back.

 

*

 

Rupert sat down on Elisabeth’s side of the bed, ostensibly to set the alarm; tomorrow they were going to use their Boxing Day to plan an assault on the study, so that they could get the shelves ready to receive their books.  There was a great deal of work to do (“Good,” Buffy had said as they all mounted the stairs to go to their several rooms), and it would need all three of them to plan.

            But his attention was only nominally on the clock in his hands; his thoughts and his pulses were all with Elisabeth in the bathroom.  They had met eyes as she gathered her robe to go for her shower—a brief touch, but enough to reinforce the feeling that had been shimmering between them, delicate and powerful, since the morning.  Or the night before, depending how you looked at it.

            He heard the bathroom door open, and a moment later Elisabeth appeared and shut the door quietly behind her.  She did not come to him directly, but headed for the closet.  Rupert curbed his disappointment and said, “I’ve set the alarm for 7.”

            “Sounds good,” Elisabeth said, her voice muffled among the clothing.  “Did you feed the cat?”

            “Yes, I put some food down for him.  And a little gravy.”

            “He’ll like that.  It was a very good meal.”

            “It was, wasn’t it?”

            “The whole day was.”

            “Yes,” he said, and turned to look at her, for her voice was clear again.

            And wonder of wonders, she was wearing the rose kimono and a gentle smile.  Whatever came out on his face in response made her drop the smile and come swiftly to him, and his arms were around her, his hands smoothing fabric and skin, and she was kissing him, and she was kneeling astride his lap, her fingers buried in his hair.

            “Oh, I’ve wanted you all day,” she breathed against his mouth: and he drew in a sharp breath.

            They fell back upon the bed and rolled, getting their sleeves tangled; Rupert pulled back enough to untangle them and then drew her close again, chuckling.

            “Ouch! that tickles,” she said.

            “Oh did it?  Well, then I’ll do it again.”  He rolled her backward to get full advantage, and she gave a childlike laugh that nearly undid him.  He buried his face against her collarbone.  “I love it,” he whispered, “when you laugh like that.”

            “Only you,” she answered on a breath, “can make—”

            He kissed her then, taking his time about it.  She kissed him back in full measure, bringing up a hand to stroke his cheek.

            Presently she pulled away, so that they lay face to face across the bed.  There was mischief in her face again.  “I started something this morning,” she murmured, “that I didn’t get to finish.”

            He tried in vain to repress a grin.  “Oh, I haven’t forgotten,” he said.

            “Well then,” she said, and pushed him over.

            He lay back acquiescently and closed his eyes, waiting for the exquisite feel of her hands smoothing away the fabric from his skin, followed by delicate, lingering kisses.  “This—” he breathed— “has definitely—” he let his hands fall open upon the bed— “been the best—ohh…Christmas—in recent—”

            “Shh,” Elisabeth said.

            “—memory,” his lips said, voiceless.

            She had come to the point now, and her clever fingers were working their way between his thighs, down and back, unerringly to a place they knew by instinct, and he gasped when they found it.  That was the other thing about her technique, of course: she was always refining it.  It was now, however, impossible for him to remark upon that aspect of the matter.  With a long sigh Rupert gave himself up to the pleasure of her gift.

            Later, he lay with eyes still closed, Elisabeth nestled against him, humming.

            He stirred himself to say:  “_Sleepers wake_ again?”

            “Mm?” She lifted her head.

            “Were you humming Bach again?”

            “No…Do you want me to?”

            He looked over at her and smiled.

            She said idly:  “I don’t normally think of Bach as bed music.”

            “No?” he said.  “I would have thought otherwise.  Besides, he had all those children.”

            A small silence fell.  Elisabeth reached to trace the bridge of his nose.

            “Thank you for my present,” she said softly.

            He met her eye.  “Thank you for mine,” he answered in the same tone.  “All of them,” he added, and she smiled.

            “I want to give you things,” she said, nestling down again.  There was a note in her voice that made him cradle her closer.

            “And I want to receive them.”  He stroked her arm, straightening the hem of the silk where it had pulled from her shoulder.  “Do you know that I love you?”

            He had spoken the words almost as a song, to smooth her past whatever moment of worry had crept in; but she choked on a sudden sob.

            “Yes,” she said, “I know you love me.”  She took a gripful of his T-shirt and curled hard against him, fighting in vain not to cry.  “I know you love me, Rupert….I know—”

            Now he understood.  Resisting the urge to smother her grief against him, he put his lips against her hair and held her, quietly, as she gave in and wept.

            It didn’t take long for her to finish.  Presently she sniffled and lifted her head away from his.  “I’m sorry,” she said, swiping at her nose.

            “Don’t be stupid,” he said, and she started to laugh.

            He helped her wipe at her face, reached to tuck her damp hair behind her ear.  “Shall I get us some tea?” he said.

            She gave him a wry look and nodded.

He began to push himself up.  “Will you stay put this time?” he asked her, with a faint smile.

            She scrambled up to sit against the headboard.  “Yes,” she said, in a tone half arch and half rueful.  Rupert sat up, resumed his boxers and his robe, bent to kiss her forehead, and went.

            When he returned a few minutes later with two cups and saucers, she said, “That was fast.”

            “I used our new kettle.”

            “Oh, excellent.” She received her tea and his while he got into bed and settled on her other side.

            They sipped in silence, comfortably shoulder to shoulder; for once there was nothing unspoken haunting the quiet between them, and when they had finished their tea, Rupert took their cups and set them over on his nightstand, then gathered her close and leaned his head back gently.

            “All right?” he asked her, after a moment.

            “Mm-hmm.”

            Another silence, then he said:  “I’ve been thinking about the study.  It’s big enough to do training in, but I don’t want swords and things flying about near our books.  I’ve been thinking perhaps we should look into building a small training house in the back meadow.  We could use it for all kinds of things, of course; and it’s a fairly quiet spot, so it’d be good for having guests, too.  It came to me when you said that about having Anne and Brian to stay.  One doesn’t want to cling to things, of course.  Lord knows I’ve set myself up for tragedy enough times…but still, it wouldn’t harm anything to grow a bit of an establishment—would it?”

            “Mm,” Elisabeth said.

            “I was thinking too, about the conservatory.  We could grow herbs in it, for kitchen and magickal use.  I’m not much of a gardener, but I think it could be done….You’re right, you know; a new thing isn’t the same as nothing.  I knew you were right, but I couldn’t realize it before….You mustn’t worry…Elisabeth…?”

            He opened his eyes and looked down, though he had already interpreted the still weight of her against him, the steadiness of her breathing.

            Elisabeth had fallen asleep.

            Gently he began to move her, until she responded by sighing down upon the bed; he tugged the rumpled covers up and over her, then reached to turn off the light before settling down.  Once the light was out and he was snuggled in behind her, Rupert found that he was easily as exhausted and drowsy as she.  As the wind picked up and rattled at the panes, his eyes fell shut and he murmured one more time to her unhearing ear:  “Merry Christmas.”

            _And a partridge in a pear tree_, he thought, just before he fell asleep himself.


	12. A Face Still Forming

_I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you_

_Which shall be the darkness of God._

…_I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope_

_For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love_

_For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith_

_But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting._

_Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:_

_So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing._

—T. S. Eliot_, Four Quartets_

 

_Willow_ _ did not need to be told that Elisabeth had gone.  The atmosphere in the house changed when Giles returned alone, and later she saw him striding calmly out to the pasture, with the air of one intending to walk a long time.  She asked him no questions, even when it became apparent that he was going to contain himself about whatever had gone wrong.  The level of scotch in the decanter did not descend; his chair at the table at mealtimes was not empty; when she returned from the times she spent with the coven he looked no different—his face merely read the same weary acquiescence as ever._

_            Still, there was something powerful there, so powerful that it was outside any attempts Giles might have made to shield it from her; powerful enough that she could not read it.  This was confirmed one day when she came in from a walk to find Giles sitting quietly at the kitchen table, radiating grief, or anger which is the lion’s share of grief.  He looked briefly at her, then away._

_            “Why did she go?” _ _Willow_ _ asked at last._

_            “She was having dreams,” he answered._

_            “Prophetic dreams?”_

_            “No one can tell,” he said.  “She didn’t describe them to me.”_

_Willow_ _ watched him for a moment.  Then:  “Will she come back?”_

_            He stared into the distance, as if doing a calculation in his head.  “I think not,” he said finally._

_            There was more to it than that, _ _Willow_ _ could tell; but she said nothing, and a moment later Giles got up and went away.  On the table he left behind him an opened envelope and a single sheet of blue paper, lightly refolded.  It was the first time he had left any bit of communication vulnerable to Willow’s scrutiny; Willow looked up briefly at the doorway where he’d gone, then slowly went to unfold the paper: slowly and gently, so that Giles could come back and stop her if he wanted to._

_            There was no letter, only a poem written out in Elisabeth’s handwriting, over the initials E.B.B.:_

 

Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand  
Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore  
Alone upon the threshold of my door  
Of individual life, I shall command  
The uses of my soul, nor lift my hand  
Serenely in the sunshine as before,  
Without the sense of that which I forbore—  
Thy touch upon the palm. The widest land  
Doom takes to part us, leaves thy heart in mine  
With pulses that beat double. What I do  
And what I dream include thee, as the wine  
Must taste of its own grapes. And when I sue  
God for myself, He hears that name of thine,  
And sees within my eyes the tears of two.

 

_It explained a lot; it explained nothing.  _ _Willow_ _ refolded the paper and left it.  She went out into the light, broad summer air, feeling as if she ought to be collecting small stones to visit a grave that didn’t exist._

 

_Elisabeth could not have explained, even to herself, why she sent the poem.  Was it an urge toward cruelty?  Was it a veiled invitation to Rupert to come to her?  The very tranquillity of __Oxford__, of the days in libraries and nights in her flat, seemed to confirm the existence of the brooding horror that bided its time.  There was no evidence that anything was about to happen, and no way to know it was happening once it had started.  No proof that the ache in her heart and the emptiness of her arms had been worth the self-infliction.  _Ifit doesn’t happen,_ she thought, _he may find it hard to forgive me._  And then:  _he may find it even harder if it does.__

_            This didn’t bear thinking about._

_            Quietly, Elisabeth arranged her books in piles to be dealt with, amassed quotations, wrote peripheral essays, endured the comments that she was looking pale and preoccupied.  Always she was listening for the knock on her door, the knock that meant Rupert had come, that meant that it had begun._

_            The day it came, she was nesting in papers, reading with a pen in her hand, and had nearly forgotten everything else.  She dropped the book to her desk, heart beating; then got up slowly and crossed to the door._

_            But it wasn’t Rupert._

_            It was Robson, with a frightened young girl behind him._

_            Which was harbinger enough._

 

*

 

Brian steered his car into the tracks he had left earlier in the day picking Anne up.  “All right?”

            Anne gathered the gift bags she had taken away from Pyke’s Lea and shifted in her seat to reach for the door handle.  “Yes, this is fine.  Thank you very much for the ride.”

            “No trouble,” Brian said easily.

            She had opened the door and was preparing to place her first foot in the snow when he said suddenly, “Are you all right?”

            She looked up to blink at him.  “Eh?”

            Brian was looking at her thoughtfully.  “You seem a little….”  He let the sentence tail off into an uncertain gesture with his head.

            She had grown accustomed to thinking of Brian as not particularly perceptive, but Anne realized afresh that she had underestimated him.  “I’m quite all right,” she said, “though very tired.  Thank you.”

            He accepted this with a small nod, which was the other thing about Brian—he had a natural solicitude for people’s private feelings…except where his passions were concerned.  Anne was aware that this had caused problems between him and Elisabeth, and she wanted no such dynamic for herself; but his courteous detachment only served to further provoke the feeling that was currently rebelling against her usual calm control.

            The trouble was, she was dear to no one in any way that would make those problems a possibility.

            Anne offered Brian a small dry smile.  “Happy Christmas,” she told him.

            “And to you.  Good night.”

            Brian waited till she had unlocked and entered the vicarage before putting his car back in gear, which was smart; but Anne moved quickly to turn on lights, the faster to show him she was safe in her home so that he would go away.

            At last she heard the sound of Brian’s engine reversing, followed by the sweep of his headlamps across the front window, and she was alone.

            Correction: she was revealed to be alone.

            With an impatient gesture she turned from her uncertain stance in the front parlor and went to put the kettle on for some tea.  When it was in the cup, and she was sitting at her kitchen table, she quaffed gently and waited for the rebellion to subside; but it didn’t.

            This was usually the moment when the phone rang, heralding the need of someone for a priest: a deathbed, a sickness, a family row.  But no such catastrophe announced itself; the silence continued and Anne wondered whether she felt grateful or furious for it.

            Bloody hell, she thought impatiently: this always happened at Christmas, so why hadn’t she put the necessary nourishments in place—called her own spiritual director, sent a card to the one cousin who spoke to her, prepared herself to focus on the joys of liturgy on her own behalf?

            _Because every so often one gets tired of the_ faute-de-mieux, her psyche answered at once.

            Anne got up and went into the dark chapel, where the only light was the candle she had lit before the creche that morning.  The flame was licking valiantly at life despite the shortness of the wick and the dwindling shine of wax.  To dismiss the temptation to view the candle as a sort of liturgical pathetic fallacy, Anne got a fresh candle out of the cabinet and replaced the old one.  Then she went to her prie-dieu and dropped slowly to kneel before the new flame.

            With her hands and eyes closed, she found images coming unbidden to mind: the joy in the face of her friend Elisabeth at the head of the table, irrepressible despite the shadows under her eyes, the remnants of laborious grief.  And then, the same face six months ago, the bright intelligent eyes stricken clean of meaning, wandering, frightened, in the sanctuary of this house.  Anne had never found the vicarage to be much of a sanctuary for herself, but it was a better hiding place, she thought now, than Pyke’s Lea.  It wasn’t just Rupert’s and Elisabeth’s difficulties that gave their house such shadows of last stands and morbid silences.  A place to live in it certainly could be, and would be, if today was any indication—but it had niggled at Anne’s vulnerabilities and magnified her own shadows all day.

            None of this passed through Anne’s mind with any coherency, nor did she pause to straighten the confluence of her feelings about the house with what she knew of her friends.  Her friends were fine.  They had passed through the weight of darkness and found refreshment in one another, which of course was what she had hoped would happen.  Her labors of prayer had paid off.

            Only such good news could undo her self-possession.  Anne lowered her forehead to rest on the aged wood, and, degree by degree, dropped her resistance against tears.  It was safe to cry in such solitude, though the solitude was the occasion for the crying in the first place; and soon she gave in altogether and wept disconsolately.  She wept because the year had been so hard and dark, because the shadows had taken them all and spit them back out again, like Jonah—like Jonah—_Yes, I am angry_, Jonah had said.  _I am angry enough to die_—the sign of Jonah, which was all they were going to get—_and the signification of that is what?_—Anne railed in her mind—_that it’s wrong to ask_?

            “_You_ asked,” she said suddenly, lifting her head to direct a tearful accusing stare at the swaddled baby in the manger.  “You asked and you weren’t answered.  So why am I still wrong?”

            As she stared down at the creche, she answered herself.  Not wrong; just not finished.

            In a sort of clean despair Anne laid her head down again; but she was done crying.  The chapel, the vicarage, now curled round her, a dark covert, hollow like the palm of a hand; empty, because free.  Or the other way round—free, because empty.

            After ten quieter breaths, she got up from the prie-dieu, took a tissue out of her cardigan pocket and blew her nose, made her customary brief bow to the cross behind the little altar, and left the chapel to go to bed.

 

*

 

By the end of Boxing Day the Bing Crosby mystique had faded from Pyke’s Lea somewhat.  The breast of snow on the front and back gardens was heavily tracked over with Rupert’s, Buffy’s, and Elisabeth’s footprints, and the snow-heaped, tarped-over pile of lumber had been raided for materials to make a scaffold.  The cold had not abated, which was all the more reason to step up their working pace on the front parlor room to make it into an acceptable lounge.  Buffy had visions of curling up in front of the fire on a couch much softer, she said, than the one Giles had lugged to Sunnydale and back.  Rupert listened to her indulgently and rejoiced to himself; there was little need for him to dream while holding the scaffold steady for Buffy to scrape the upper reaches of the ceiling free of wallpaper, for this was precisely what he had wanted.

            Elisabeth, meanwhile, was dreaming about the study.  When she wasn’t muttering and flipping through books in front of her laptop, she was wracketing tape measures across the bookshelves, mapping future shelving schemes, and reading the labels on woodstains and cleaners.  Rupert let her get on with it.  The study was his by logistical necessity, but it was hers by conquest.

            For two days they worked unremittingly and ate leftovers cold or hot according to their mood.  The second night they stood in the center of their new lounge, looking round appreciatively at the freshly-painted walls—Buffy had made the final decision on the color, a warm Devonshire cream—and poured themselves some brandy to drink to it.

            Warm with brandy and aching in every fiber, they dragged themselves up the stairs to bed, and were all of them asleep within a quarter of an hour.

            But in the small hours Rupert woke to find Elisabeth shuddering beside him in the bed.  Holding his breath, he went very still and waited to see if she would subside and return to quiet sleep; but of course she did not:  she began to stir and make small noises in her throat.

            He had promised her that he would hold her as before.  But he had hoped that he wouldn’t need to.  He could feel paralysis creeping over his will; any moment now she would cry in her sleep and speak his name in fear, and he would not be able to move to save her.

            Elisabeth whimpered, and before the paralysis could solidify, he broke it and reached for her.

            “Elisabeth…wake up now.”  His voice gravelled and caught in his throat, and he cleared it.  “Elisabeth!”

            He heard her catch a sharp breath; she shook harder, and woke.  He tried to speak her name again, but his voice failed him; instead, he chafed her arm gently under the covers and breathed into her hair.

            Elisabeth turned over to face him, which she had never willingly done before; then she burrowed against him and clung until her breathing evened.  Rupert held her, cradling her close until he could clear his throat again.

            “Was it—” he swallowed and continued in a whisper— “the same?”

            Elisabeth shook her head.  “No,” she said thickly, her breath warm against his shirt.  “Not that…not that dream.”  And then, almost indistinctly:  “The older one.”

            He knew she could feel the instant release in his muscles, but the relief bypassed shame and reached his heart, unbinding his sympathy for her.  “Damn,” he said.  “I’m sorry.”

            “Hold me awhile?” she mumbled.

            “Of course.”

            In the darkness she curled close to him; he closed his eyes and bent his head, to let his lips brush her hair.  Their combined warmth radiated through their nest of covers; presently Elisabeth sighed back into sleep, and he released her gently so that she could return to her usual sleeping position.

            The moon came out and pearled the darkness, reflecting on the snow outside; and Rupert lay awake.

 

*

 

On Monday they had Brian to dinner—real dinner, not leftovers—for which he brought a cheesecake for dessert.  Inviting him had been Buffy’s idea; Giles leveled a thoughtful look her way when she brought it up, but he said nothing.  It was Elisabeth they both watched: she looked quite joyful at the suggestion, but also—and Buffy was pretty sure Giles didn’t miss it either—pensive.  Which meant that she was right, and Elisabeth and Brian needed to talk.

            Brian brought cheer into the house as well as cheesecake.  He teased Buffy about a snow-fight rematch and let Elisabeth tease him about his new Gibbon; and even he and Giles were gentle to one another.  Over dinner he drew Elisabeth into a discussion of fairytale that brushed the topic of her thesis lightly enough that she looked more cheerful about her task than she had in weeks.  Buffy didn’t miss the little dent between Giles’s brows that appeared when he saw Elisabeth gesturing happily over her plate, off and running about Dante at the end of the _Purgatorio_; but if he was jealous of Brian’s ability to set Elisabeth at ease academically, he—being Giles—let it go, and melted quietly away after the dishes were cleared, saying something about catching up on his files in the study.

            The conversation lasted until Elisabeth had got nearly to the bottom of the sinkful of dishes; Buffy busied herself with clearing the table of leftovers and putting them away, while Brian dried the dishes Elisabeth handed him.  Then, casually, Brian said:  “So.  Is it time for you to tell me what happened?”

            Buffy ducked back out of the room with a damp rag to wipe down the table, but she could still hear Elisabeth’s reply.

            “I’ve been having nightmares,” she said on a sigh.  “Some of them were about Rupert.  Most of them, actually.  I…couldn’t bear to tell him what I was dreaming about.  But then he figured it out.  Shit, meet fan.”

            Brian made a small sympathetic noise.  Buffy scrubbed harder at the dining table.

            “But it made us talk about it, which we never had really done.  I think we’re okay now.”  Her voice was cautious but steady.

            “And did you stop dreaming about it?”

            “About Rupert?” Elisabeth answered, distantly.  “Yes.”

            Brian didn’t ask what else Elisabeth might have to dream about.  Perhaps he, too, was thinking about the First, because he said:  “Did you tell _anyone_?  Because…well—”

            “—Because that’s what got me in trouble the first time?” Elisabeth finished, bitterly.  “I did tell Anne about the dreams.  She advised me to tell Rupert, of course.  But I couldn’t bear the thought of it; and I had this…vague sense that—that since I had to keep silence about stuff I had no business knowing, I might as well keep silence about what it cost me.”

            At this, Buffy put down the rag and went back into the kitchen, just as Brian replied.

            “Idiot,” he said.

            “Yeah,” Buffy said, “what he said.”

            Elisabeth cast her eyes down on a faint rueful smile.  Then she reached and turned off the tap.  A small silence fell.  Buffy watched Brian: he was looking at Elisabeth with a tenderness sharpened by—analysis, perhaps; she remembered what it had been like in the last Sunnydale war, how just thinking about the situation hardened one’s attitude.  And here was another thing she hadn’t realized fully: Brian had been there.  He had gone through all that, with Elisabeth.  It said something about him that he was still here.

            Finally Brian said:  “So you…talked about It.  With Rupert.”

            Elisabeth sighed deeply and nodded, bracing her hands on the counter behind her.

            “And…?”  Brian stopped, uncertainly.

            Elisabeth was staring thoughtfully into the distance.  “The thorn’s out,” she said, after a moment.  “There’s still my….”  Buffy saw her eyes suddenly focus, and she turned to see that Giles had reappeared in the doorway, and was looking her way.

            “Buffy,” he said quietly, “can I speak with you a moment?”

            Buffy felt herself blushing hot.  Brian’s color had also risen; Elisabeth alone looked calm.

            “Sure,” Buffy said.

            She followed him back to the study, heart beating quickly.

            “I’ve had an interesting email from Xander,” Giles said, returning to his computer desk and sitting down to mouse up the window.  “Have a look.”

            It took Buffy a moment, bending down to look at the monitor, to switch her thoughts from the track of getting-in-trouble-for-gossiping to the track of being-asked-advice-about-Slayer-business.  She stopped and reread Xander’s first paragraph.  That there was more than one paragraph said something in itself: Xander’s reports were usually short and to the point.  Even with a lot to say, however, he hadn’t exactly beat around the bush.

            _I wouldn’t have recognized the guy if he hadn’t given me that second look when the flames went up_, she read.  _I know the village dust-up wasn’t an accident, but now I wonder what my stalker might have to do with it_.  Then, laconically:  _I hope I don’t have to kill him_.

            “Shit,” Buffy said.  “Somebody’s following Xander around.  Have you talked to Willow about this?”

            “Not yet.”  Giles leaned back slowly in his desk chair.  “I wanted your input first.  What do you think this means?”

            He was looking at her very levelly: he knew exactly what she was thinking, and knew she knew it.

            Buffy chose her words slowly.  “Do you think the Council is trying to pick up info?  And if that’s true, how would they know where Xander was?”

            “That they know _who_ he is is a clue, I think,” Giles said.

            “A clue that they really are Watchers?  Or a clue that they’ve found a source of information?”

            Damn, that sounded like an accusation.  She waited for Giles to go ballistic.

            He didn’t.

            “Both,” he said.

            After a moment— “Shit,” Buffy said again.  Now she was worried; and that in itself was weird—she rarely worried about Xander in foreign lands with possible demons on the loose, but spied on by morally ambiguous men who resented her power?  “Can’t we up his protection somehow?”

            “We’ll want Willow for that.  Perhaps you should call her,” Giles said.

            “Perhaps _you_ should call her,” Buffy retorted.  “You’ve owed her a phone call longer than I have.”

            Giles gave a small sigh and linked his hands over his stomach.  “I suppose.  Has Elisabeth put on water for tea?”

            “Dunno,” Buffy said.  “Nobody said anything about tea.”

            “Perhaps you’d go and ask?  And you can see if they’ve finished talking about me, as well.”

            Buffy gave him a look, which he returned with mild humor over his glass-rims.  The cat, who had lurked unnoticed under the desk, leapt into his lap and began to settle in a tight curl across his thighs.  _The thorn’s out_, Elisabeth had said.

            “Shall I report back?” Buffy said dryly.

            “That won’t be necessary,” he answered.  “I’ll be along in a minute.”

            “Yeah,” Buffy said, “if the cat decides you can get up.  Make him call Willow,” she told the cat, and went.

 

*

 

Elisabeth saw Brian out; his footsteps crunched on the lingering bits of snow clinging to the walk as he made his way through the dark to his car.  When his headlights came up, she smiled into the night and closed the door.

            Buffy had already gone upstairs to claim the shower, so Elisabeth went into the kitchen instead and gathered together the teacups to wash.  Rupert’s cup was still with him in the study, so she ventured back there.  He was still on the phone, the cat curled and purring on his corduroy lap; he looked up from his conversation—which on his end mostly consisted of nods and grunts—to give Elisabeth a faint wry smile as she retrieved his empty cup.  She returned the smile and quietly retreated.

            She felt an oil-and-water mix of safety and discomfort.  She had accepted a prolonged hug from Brian before he left, which she did not remember doing since the days after her return from Bath, weakened and grieved, six months ago.  Brian’s understanding had grown—the longing and impatience had gone out of the look he gave her—which she suspected was largely Buffy’s doing.  Elisabeth had an idea that Buffy and Brian had bonded in a way that Rupert would dislike intensely if he knew.  There was plenty to justify suspicion, but it seemed Rupert was doing his best to ignore it.

            All should have been well.  But the old dream had come back—no, strictly speaking, the old waking nightmare had repackaged itself as a dream.  Elisabeth thought it was distinctly unfair that she should have got rid of Rupert’s dream with a pitchfork only to have the other one come in the barn door with—  She shook her head and sighed.  The solution to the one problem had been to talk with Rupert.  Who was there to talk to about this?  The First?

            “Not bloody likely,” she said to the kitchen in a savage murmur.

            She decided, instead of waiting for Rupert to get off the phone or Buffy to get out of the shower, to go to bed.

            She was still thumbing over her paperback of the _Purgatorio_, however, when Rupert came quietly up the stairs and into the room.  “Ah,” he said softly.  “You’re still awake.”

            “Yeah,” she answered.  After a moment she bookmarked Dante and set the book on the far side of the nightstand, to watch Rupert undress.  His movements were calm but thoughtful: he folded both jumper and trousers neatly over the chair in the corner.  He didn’t change into pajamas but climbed into bed next to her in T-shirt and boxers—which could have betokened any number of things, including the nothing that was habit.

            “So what’s the story?” Elisabeth asked, watching him shift about and move pillows to his liking.

            At first she thought he didn’t want to tell her.  But then he turned onto his side facing her, folded a pillow under his ear, and said:  “Someone’s following Xander around.”

            Silence caught her breath; then she let out a sigh.  “Damn.  Is he all right?”

            Rupert shrugged.  “For now.  I called Willow to discuss ways of protecting him.”

            “What did she say?”

            He gave a long sigh and an eyeroll.  “Well, she spent most of the time quizzing me about my state of mind, so the subject wasn’t covered as thoroughly as it might have been.”

            Elisabeth half-snorted into a chuckle.  “I can sympathize.”

            His eyes found hers.  “Did you confess to Brian’s satisfaction?”

            “I think so.”  A small knot relaxed itself inside her.  This was what she had asked him for—undemanding honesty resting between them.

            Rupert gave her a small smile.

            “Who’s following Xander?  Do you know?”

            “Buffy and I suspect Council.”

            “Oh dear,” Elisabeth said.  “It’s inevitable, I guess—but not more welcome for that….How did they find him?”

            “That’s what we need to find out.”  He gave her the substance of Xander’s email, and of Buffy’s response to it.  “Amazingly,” he said, “she didn’t…freak out.”

            “You were expecting her to?”  Elisabeth said, amused.

            “Well….”

            “Who’s been doing most of the freaking out about Council interference?” she added, boldly.

            “Me,” he admitted on a groan.  “But I’ve…I don’t know.  I expect Buffy to react sooner than think.  I’m probably not doing her justice.”

            “Well, we’re probably not used to not being deep in an apocalypse by Christmastime.”

            He let his gaze bury itself in the middle distance; she watched lovingly, head on her pillow.  “No,” he agreed, at length.  “Bit unsubtle for me to give Buffy the pocket watch, wasn’t it.”

            “I think she took it in the best possible light.”  Elisabeth reached to stroke his shoulder. 

            “Yes, well,” he said, “what we’re going to do about this I don’t know.”

            Instead of offering what could only be an inane answer, Elisabeth snuggled down into the nest of covers and sighed.  Their bed was very comfortable; but there was an unsafety that lurked in the darkness of her mind.  Rupert glanced at her, then turned over to turn out the lamp on his side.  But when he reached over her shoulder to get hers, she said suddenly— “Can I have the light on tonight?”

            He drew back his hand and bent his gaze to her face.  “Are you all right?” he said, after a moment.

            Xander wasn’t safe, and probably not comfortable either.  “I’m fine,” she said.  “I just like to know where I am, tonight.”

            He did not withdraw his gaze, so she turned over and tried to settle into her usual position, as if there were no reason to be concerned.  She felt him lay his head down close to her, from behind.  “It won’t bother you?” she said.

            “Can I do anything?”

            It was not the words so much as the tone that made her turn to look at him.  “You’re already doing it,” she told him softly.

            He gave her a small smile; she turned again to lay her head down and close her eyes; and after a while they both fell asleep.

 

*

 

The next day, Buffy and Elisabeth started on the arduous task of scraping the walls of the study clean to receive fresh paint.  “On the bright side,” Buffy said, rocking the ladder with her strokes, “there are all these bookcases.  And on the not-so-bright side—”

            “—there are all these bookcases,” Elisabeth said, grunting as she picked at the grimy beads of old paint clinging between the edge of one case and the wall.

            Rupert had gone to the hardware store, with a list of DIY provisions in hand; as soon as he had gone Buffy got out the boombox, which hadn’t seen any use since before the exorcism, and put on a CD of lively tunes.

            Singing along, sometimes half-dancing, they worked their way toward one another at the center, where the fireplace was.

            “What are we doing for tomorrow night?” Buffy asked, stripping off her gloves to rebind her hair in its messy ponytail.

            “Well, Andrew’s plane gets in tomorrow afternoon; after we pick him up, I imagine we’ll all have dinner—I’ve invited Anne and Brian to see the New Year in.”

            “Full house, then,” Buffy said.  “House is always a bit fuller when Andrew’s here.”

            “Damn, that reminds me,” Elisabeth said.  “I need to bring up the air mattress from the flat.”

            “Can I help?”

            Elisabeth turned, thoughtful.  “You know, there is something I might ask you to do.  I was thinking of asking Brian if he’d go and pick up Andrew from the airport.  We have a lot to do tomorrow, and I want Rupert sane.”

            Buffy snorted into a laugh.

            “Do you think you could go with him?”

            Buffy finished laughing and thought about it.  “Sure.  I could go.”

            “I’m sure he will mind the errand less if you’re going along.”  Elisabeth pursed her lips on a dry smile.

            She was not surprised to see Buffy blush and reach quickly for her gloves.

            “So,” Elisabeth said, “_did_ you have a fling with him?”

            “I—”  Buffy blushed harder, then set her shoulders straight.  “I kissed him.”

            She was looking sideways at Elisabeth, to gauge her reaction; Elisabeth grinned.  “Good for you,” she said.  Then added, with a facial shrug, “He’s a good kisser.”

            Buffy opened her mouth, then shut it again; then said:  “So—you guys—”

            “We didn’t get much further than kissing,” Elisabeth said.  “But yeah.”

            “Is that why Giles doesn’t like him?”

            Elisabeth thought Buffy knew perfectly well why Brian and Rupert disliked each other, but she said, “One of the reasons, I guess.  Brian has a knack for winning people’s confidence—he clicked with Xander straight off, when he was here.”

            “_That_ would make Giles jealous.”

            “Yeah.”  Elisabeth took up her scraper again.  “I think you probably have the right idea not telling him how _you_ clicked with Brian.  That would make him even more jealous.”

            Buffy stopped: Elisabeth could feel her gaze, but steadfastly kept scraping.

            “Not,” Buffy said finally, “jealous in the same way he is of you.”

            “No,” Elisabeth said; “but it’s not as dissimilar a thing as you may think.”

            She waited for Buffy to deny it, or to dissemble.  But— “Yeah,” she said.

            “‘Course,” Elisabeth said, “there’s some of that going with Rupert and Brian too, though you’d never get either one of them to admit it.”

            “You mean sexual tension that runs on premium hate-octane?  No kidding.  I mean, it’s no wonder he never asked what was up with me and Spike in the first place—I mean, _he_ should talk, and then there was that whole Ethan thing, and that was a world of _ugh_.”

            “Xander said—”  Elisabeth broke off.  That would be too mean, and she felt suddenly cheap.

            But it was too late.  “What,” Buffy said, with a familiar edge to her voice.

            Elisabeth blushed hard.  “He—said—that sometimes listening to you and Rupert go on, he found himself wishing you would just—you know—”

            “Yes?”

            A lame periphrasis was not going to cut it.  Elisabeth took a deep breath and got it over with.  “‘Just fuck already,’ is what he said.”

            Buffy was silent.  It took Elisabeth a moment to get up the courage to look over at her; when she did, she found that Buffy was staring into the middle distance with her lips pushed out thoughtfully.

            “Typical Xander,” she said finally, though her color was high.

            “He’d be so embarrassed if he knew I told you that,” Elisabeth said, cringing afresh.  “Fact, he’d probably kill me.”

            “Not if I killed him first,” Buffy retorted.  Then:  “Did Giles tell you about what happened?”

            “Yeah,” Elisabeth said.  “Doesn’t bode well, does it.”

            Buffy shook her head.  “I talked to Will a little bit last night, and there’s not a whole lot she can do other than send extra energy to the amulet she gave him.”  She got down from her ladder and moved it to the side of the fireplace near Elisabeth, with an air that suggested she was glad to be well launched on the new subject.  “I was afraid Giles was going to freak out if I mentioned the Council,” she added, clattering up with her scraper.  “But he didn’t.”

            “No,” Elisabeth agreed.  Then added after a moment, “Poor Rupert.”

            Buffy answered only with a sigh, and set to work.  For a few minutes the only sound was the grumble of their scrapers and the creak of their ladders above the music.  Then Buffy said, “Did we put caulk on Giles’s list?”

            “I don’t think so,” Elisabeth said, wiping the blade of her scraper with gloved fingers.  “We still have some spackle, though.  Is there a crack?”

            “Yeah.  It’s—” she grunted, digging along the top of the shelf— “running along between the shelf and the wall.”

            Elisabeth looked up.  “Weird.  All the shelves I’ve been doing are sealed to the wall.”

            “Mine too.”  Buffy stopped struggling with the scraper and put it down to lean back and survey the whole case.  “Hey, look.”  She pointed at the division between her rank and the one next to it.  “The boards are doubled up here.”

            Elisabeth had noticed that when making her measurements, but had assumed that it indicated where new shelves had been added to the ones either side of the fireplace.  But now she realized that there was no doubled divider on the other side.  “Weird,” she said again.

            With sudden energy Buffy picked up the scraper, and instead of trying to spare the crack along the top, began attacking it from end to end of the case.  “Careful!” Elisabeth uttered, but Buffy, unheeding, drew the corner of the scraper along in one last flourish, then backed in half a jump off the ladder and dragged it back.  “There’s something behind it,” she said, stepping back.  “Yeah! look, there’s a space let in next to the fireplace so you can—”

            Elisabeth got off her ladder at top speed, almost falling, and backed up to watch as Buffy searched for a handhold at the doubled divider.  She found one and began to haul with feet braced.

            At first nothing happened; not even Buffy’s strength had any effect at all on the sturdy bookcase.  But then there was a long groan, and a rattle of dust, and the bookcase came free an inch.  “It’s coming away!” Elisabeth cried, elation and terror rising in her chest at once.

            Buffy tore off her gloves and redoubled her efforts.  Elisabeth snatched off hers, then dashed to grab the edge of the rug behind Buffy’s heels and peel it back.  With a terrible rending noise, the bookcase came fully free of the plaster and began to swing, horribly shuddering and grating, toward the fireplace.

            The terror overcame Elisabeth’s elation.  She dropped the edge of the rug and backed away.  Buffy hauled and tugged, and there was revealed behind the bookcase, not blank wall, or even a door, but a smaller square black maw, into which Buffy’s scraper fell with a hollow clatter from the top of the bookcase.  They heard it rattle far down, and the dust fell, and then it was still.  Dry cold crept from the maw toward them.

            Buffy let go of the bookcase and straightened, panting and pink-faced.  “Hey!” she said.  “Looks like you got a secret passageway.  Wonder where it goes?”

            “Don’t go down there!” Elisabeth said sharply.

            Buffy turned to Elisabeth where she stood a safe twelve paces back, and gave her a look.  “Are you kidding?  Giles would never forgive me if I explored his secret passageway without him.  We’ll have to wait till he comes back.”

            Elisabeth did not like this idea any better, but she got hold of herself.  “It’s got to be the priesthole,” she said, controlling a shiver with an effort.  “They must have rebuilt it.”

            “What’s a priesthole?” Buffy asked.

            Elisabeth explained, hugging herself to stop the shuddering of her gut muscles as she spoke.  She didn’t dare to go nearer, but she could see from where she stood that the passage, however it was built, went down to the right.  Straight in ahead was the other wall: behind that—Elisabeth’s thoughts raced—must be the back of the staircase, where the little downstairs bathroom was.  Now that it had been revealed, it was hard to imagine the priesthole’s entrance being anywhere _but_ the study; but it was possible that another door had once reached it from that space.  And why would they have rebuilt the priesthole after its discovery and ruin?  And how would they have replaced all the books that camouflaged it?  Elisabeth was beginning to realize that she had not thought very deeply about the Bartholomaes and their house at all.

            Buffy was not far behind.  “It seems weird they’d rebuild this hiding place, if everybody already knew about it.  Why would you cover over something people already knew was there?”

            The words struck past the surface of Elisabeth’s consciousness and pricked her heart.  Why indeed cover it over—why curl round the little heart of darkness and shield it so persistently?  _What are you protecting?_

            “I suppose,” Elisabeth answered slowly, “because the hole hasn’t gone away.  You’d have to do _something_ with it, if it’s still there.”

            _And you’d know that you would eventually have to go back in._

            Buffy, studying Elisabeth’s face as she stared at the little maw, opened her mouth to speak; but before she could ask her question, the front door rattled and opened.  “I’m home!” Rupert called amid the flyaway sounds of plastic shopping bags.  “And I’ve got lunch.”

            They waited; it didn’t take long before Rupert’s steps tracked their silence back to the study:  Elisabeth realized all at once that the CD Buffy had put on had finished minutes ago.

            “I thought the ‘lunch’ bit would bring you both running,” he said as he came in the door; and then he stopped dead at the sight of their little tableau—Elisabeth in recoil, Buffy coated in centuries-old dust, and the black doorway where a bookcase had been.

            There was a silence; then, “Good Lord,” Rupert said.  “You found it.”

            “Don’t think anyone but a Slayer could have got it open,” Elisabeth said, hardily.  To her dismay, Rupert went immediately forward and began to examine the bookcase and the opening.  “I see,” he murmured.  “It’s set a bit back from the mantelpiece—I did think that was odd—wonder why I didn’t consider—yes, looks like there’s the mechanism, rusted away, of course, though the air coming up is remarkably dry….Buffy, would you get my torch from the toolbox in the conservatory?”  Buffy was off like a shot, and back, before Elisabeth could even formulate a protest.

            Now they were both peering down the dark shaft, Rupert playing the torch up and down.  “Yes, that’s where the steps become stone; no telling how sturdy the wooden part is.  You’d probably better go first, Buffy.”

            Elisabeth forced her voice to work.  “I don’t think anyone should be going down there!”

            They both turned to look at her, blinking.  Finally Rupert said gently, “I think the danger’s gone from it, Elisabeth.  It was a pretty thorough exorcism.”

            “I know that,” Elisabeth said, shaking and ashamed of it.  “But you don’t know if it’s stable.  It’s—” she held back the word _dark_— “closed off underground.  Ready to fall down for all we know.”

            “Well,” he said, even more gently, “we should find out now that we can.”

            They were going down.  Elisabeth said nothing more to stop them; and Rupert turned to hand Buffy the torch.  “Careful,” he said, as she edged her foot down to the first riser.  When the stair did not so much as creak, she went down more easily, and Rupert followed her.  Involuntarily Elisabeth drew toward the opening, to watch them disappear, conflicting emotions churning in her stomach.  “What’s her deal?” she heard Buffy say, in a voice of indistinct concern.

            “She can’t bear the dark,” Rupert murmured back, briefly, and Elisabeth’s hands clenched, nails sharp against the palms.  She felt a sudden furious urge to go down there and show them she could explore dark places with the best of them—and it was her house too, dammit—but she had already done herself out of the opportunity.  Someone had to stay up here and be ready for an emergency, and she had nominated herself for that post by default.

            Below, she could see the shifting beam of the flashlight as they played it over the passage; they had disappeared, but she could hear their voices, and she didn’t need to be able to make out the words to hear the boyish excitement in Rupert’s.  She leaned a hand on the rough lintel of the priesthole and heard herself give a long sigh.  If they were going to talk about jealousy, it might as well be admitted: she had things to be jealous of too. 

            She waited for them to come back up; but it took forever, and since she could hear Rupert’s voice faintly the whole time, an irrational anger took up all the space of relief.  When at last she caught sight of Rupert’s grinning, dirt-smeared face at the bottom of the stone steps, she was seized with an urge to brain him with his torch.  She crossed her arms to resist the temptation.

            “There’s a passage,” he said to her, even before he got all the way up the stairs.  Elisabeth moved back, glaring at him stonily with arms crossed, so that he could come up into the room.  “Goes out into the wood.  Remember that grate amongst those rocks?  The sewer behind it’s fallen in, of course, but I bet that’s where the passage was meant to go.  It won’t be hard to excavate it.  There’s a room too, of course, but it’s empty as far as I can tell.  Not that we won’t be going thoroughly over it, of course—”  He broke off, noticing at last that she was looking like she wanted to go thoroughly over _him_, and not in the good way.

            “It’s quite safe,” he said, with an appeasing note in his voice that touched fire to her anger.

            “And I guess I’m just supposed to take your word for it,” Elisabeth snapped.  “As if I were a—a deficient child who—”

            “You didn’t want to go down there,” he protested, quite reasonably.  “I only—”

            “I conquered this house, in case you’ve forgotten!”  Elisabeth uncrossed her arms, hands in hard fists.

            Rupert’s answer was quiet.  “I haven’t forgotten.”

            “Then give me my—”  But Buffy was stamping up the steps, and Elisabeth snatched away the end of her own sentence, her face going hot.

            “Boy,” Buffy said, dusting off hands dark with dirt, and shaking cobwebs out of her hair, “nothing like exploring secret passages to give a girl an appetite.  What’s for lunch?”

            “Indian takeaway,” Rupert answered.  His eyes were still on Elisabeth.  “Let’s go eat it while it’s still warm.”

            “That’s okay.”  Elisabeth hated the thin strained sound of her own voice.  “I’m not hungry.”  Before either could reply, she strode from the room and took the stairs at a quick pace.  When she got up to her bedroom, she shut the door against them firmly: just short of a slam.

            At least she hadn’t been lying; she wasn’t hungry, she was tied in knots inside.  And she knew she’d just behaved like an idiot, which only made it ten times worse.  It just proved, conclusively, that she was an albatross.

            Elisabeth curled up on the bed with her legs drawn up, half sitting against the pillows and the headboard.  She peeled off her sneakers to keep the duvet clean, but made no other concessions to either neatness or comfort.

            She heard Rupert’s footsteps coming up the stairs.  She cleared her throat, prepared to refuse him entry if—when—he knocked.

            But he didn’t knock.  He just opened the door and came in, bearing a bowl of mulligatawny on a plate with a piece of nan bread next to it.  He set it down on her nightstand: a curl of steam rose from the surface of the soup as if to beckon her.  Elisabeth’s tongue began to ache hard at the root.

            “Don’t be nice to me,” she said.  “I don’t deserve it.”

            She glanced up at him briefly, and saw a sudden hardness come into his concerned face.

            “Don’t be so stupid,” he said, sharply.  “And I’ll be nice to you if I please.”  He must have caught the petulant note in that last, because his lips twitched afterward, as if to add, _So there_.  But Elisabeth wasn’t ready to laugh, not even at him.

            “It’s embarrassing,” she said miserably.  “I’m embarrassed.”

            “Eat your soup,” Rupert said.

            “Is that an order?”  She gave him a sullen glare from under her brows, and he smiled grimly.

            “It’s a reinforced suggestion,” he said, and turned to go.

            To her chagrin, Elisabeth’s eyes began to brim.  “I’m sorry,” she said, bleakly.

            Rupert stopped, and turned to look her directly in the eyes.  “I know.  Tell me what I am to do,” he said, “when the time comes.”

            She frowned, and the urge to tears subsided.  “Time comes for what?”

            “I think you’ll know before I do,” he said gently.  “Eat your soup.”

            He went away.

            After a minute of the silence he left behind him, Elisabeth decided that for the moment it would be difficult to worsen her feeling of shame; so she reached out slowly for the bowl of soup, and began to spoon it up and eat it.

 

*

 

It turned out to be less difficult to face Buffy than she feared; that evening, just before dinner, she ventured downstairs, and all Buffy did when she saw her was give a sympathetic grimace and ask, “You okay?”  Elisabeth gave her a self-deprecating eyeroll, and Buffy patted her shoulder with a hand that was competently gentle despite being marked for slaying.

            She glanced into the study, but didn’t go in: the bookcase had been left open for the time being, and the blackness of the door hole was worse in lamplight than daylight.  Elisabeth tried not to think about it while they ate dinner, and even managed to forget about the maw for a space of time while they played several hands of spades at the dining room table afterward.  Rupert volunteered, unobtrusively, to shut up the house for the night; and she went upstairs to shower and dress for bed.

            When he came upstairs, he found her already in bed, wearing her new blue pajamas.  “I closed up the priesthole for the night, too,” he said, going to the closet to undress.

            Elisabeth nodded.  She had heard the noise downstairs, and known what it meant.  And what Rupert meant by it.  And apparently she wasn’t finished being proud.  When Rupert was buttoning up his own pajama shirt, she reached for her lamp, the only light in the room.  As she knew he would, Rupert looked up.  “D’you not want the light tonight?” he asked, tentatively.

            “No,” was all she said; and she knew he’d caught the look on her face when the light clicked off.  He got into bed without protest, and settled down close to her but not quite touching.  She knew what this meant too: it meant that he had chosen patience—Giles patience, which like Giles pissitude was inimitable and unmistakable.  A part of her rejoiced at Rupert being so like himself, another part of her was furious at him for not taking her bait, and a third and larger part of her was wishing she had swallowed her pride and left the light on.

            Going determinedly to sleep would be a good way to flip off her own fear; but staying awake would at least forestall the dreams she knew were biding their moment to attack.  _I will make your darkness rise up and consume you_, the First had promised her; _and I will make him watch_.  Was it foolish of her to believe that the First would not, could not fulfill that promise even after defeat?  Like a time bomb; like the gestation of a plague.  The black door hole down in the study could have opened the door to her own contagion, unzipped the secure seal between reality and the Nothing.

            Fear and pain; pain and fear.  She had known pain during her vigil in Rupert’s apartment in Bath, had offered it as the only thing she had to sacrifice on behalf of the world.  Sacrifice; Anne had said something about sacrifice.  And—Nothing was the womb of creation, Anne had said.  But she could be wrong.  Hope was usually wrong.

            The night deepened, and Elisabeth shuddered, fighting both sleep and panic at once.  But it wasn’t till Rupert stirred and sat up behind her that she realized that her cocoon of pain and fear was not opaque.  He might have been getting up to visit the bathroom; but she knew he wasn’t.  He got out of bed; came round to her side and drew the covers gently away from her; found her hand and pulled steadily till she sat up.  Obediently she got out of bed, into the dark chill, and let Rupert drape her own robe over her shoulders and lead her downstairs.

            The kitchen light lanced hard across her vision, and she winced.  He put her in a chair at the table and filled the electric kettle, his hands the steadiest thing in the room.  There was a thick glut of nausea in her gorge, but when he put before her a steaming cup of chamomile tea, she wrapped both her hands round its warmth and prepared herself to swallow sips of it.  Rupert sat down across from her and rested his lips against his clasped hands.  She studied his face for a moment: there were weary shadows and lines under his eyes, but the expression in them was calm.  She owed him an explanation; and she lowered her own gaze to the shining amber liquid in her cup, to form the words.

            Rupert cleared his throat softly.  “You don’t need to say anything,” he said.  “Just drink your tea.”

            Elisabeth’s throat ached again; but she put the cup to her lips and sipped, and the hot tea smoothed the ache away a little with every swallow.

            When the tea was gone, he took her cup and washed it, then led her back upstairs, where he put her to bed and tucked her up.  She heard him open the nightstand drawer and rummage among the few paperbacks, pens, index cards (for nighttime inspirations), and sex-related accoutrements; a box of matches rattled, and he struck one to light a fresh tea-light, which he then placed in the candle stand he had given her.  The light flickered brightly, jewel-like among the mosaic pieces of glass; he turned it so that she could see it fully, and went to crawl into bed beside her.

            As the bed re-warmed with their presence, she reached under the covers to find his hand and give it a small squeeze.  He returned the gesture, then turned over to burrow in his pillow and sigh down to sleep.  With the candle burning before her face, Elisabeth closed her eyes.  She fell asleep, and did not dream at all.

            Elisabeth woke in the pale dawn to find the candle burned out and dark; and she knew what she had to do.

 

*

 

Rupert was afraid.  The fact that the opening of the little black door in the study brought him no threat only compounded the incipient anxiety underlying his breath.  He felt no threat from the open priesthole; but the shadow it raised in Elisabeth’s eyes brought back everything he had ever feared for her and for himself.  But it was useless to panic.  She needed him to be steady; and he found that he could.

            In the morning, he rose and began the task of tidying the house for their guests that would come in the evening to help them see in the new year.  Elisabeth came down, grim and calm, and turned a hand to help without a word.

            Brian was to come later in the morning, to pick up Buffy and go to the airport to get Andrew.  Elisabeth had made this arrangement yesterday evening, and though he approved of it, Rupert also didn’t know that he entirely wanted Buffy to leave him and Elisabeth alone.

            When they heard Brian’s car picking its way up the gravel of the lane, Rupert, in the dining room, saw Buffy turn to Elisabeth where they stood in the kitchen and say in a low voice, “Are you sure you want me to go?  Do you need me here?”

            Elisabeth’s chin went down, and she didn’t answer for a moment.  Then she said:  “I think I need you to go with Brian more.”

            Far more than the words, the note in her voice set him atremble with fear, and he didn’t wait to hear Buffy’s reply but fled to the lounge to watch from the front window as she and Brian went out the front door and down the path to his car.  Brian’s laugh reached him from outside; the doors slammed; and he watched the taillights of his car disappear down the lane.

            And behind him he felt as much as heard Elisabeth come into the room.

            “Rupert,” she said, in half a whisper.

            He turned.  She was pale—paler than pale, white; her face set and resolute.

            “Yes?”  His voice came out faint and strained, and he knew his fear was visible on his face.

            “I need to ask something of you,” she said, now trembling.  He waited.

            She swallowed and went on.  “Do you…do you remember when we tried to do that meditation…back in Sunnydale?”

            Did he remember?  It seemed to him now that each day he’d lived with her had been a remembering, and he already knew what she was going to say next, as if it all had been decided long ago.  He nodded.

            “I need to go back there,” she said, her voice flat.  “I need you to take me back there.”

            She had said it: and he knew that his only hope lay in choosing to do what she asked.  He opened his mouth, shakily, but his throat was silent.

            But she saw what was in his face, and said abruptly:  “I can’t go on if I don’t make peace with the darkness.  I don’t want to, but I have to.  Please; can you help me?”

            Rupert could not make her plead with him.  He cleared his throat forcibly.  “Let’s see what we can do,” he said.  He went to her and took her hand; and she followed him, inevitably, to the study.

            Rupert opened the doors of his armoire in the corner.  He must not think, he must just do it.  “I’m afraid,” he said softly, “that my crystal set didn’t survive the Hellmouth.  We’ll have to find other things to use instead.”  There was, in fact, not much in his armoire; he had neglected to replenish the basic supplies he usually kept for workings.  There were a few small jars of herbs, his bottle of scotch, two ancient Tarot decks in drawstring pouches, some well-thumbed books of tables and spells, and two unpacked cardboard cartons of odds and ends that he’d salvaged from the various wreckages he’d left behind.  With a sudden alacrity he grabbed one of them and began to rummage in it.  Incense—no; bell—no; statue of Kali—definitely not.  “Ah!” he uttered, and dug deeper in the box till he had unearthed the drawstring bag he’d caught sight of: a small quartz crystal sphere, if he was not mistaken.  He put down the box and shook the globe into his palm; then he looked up.

            Elisabeth, at his side, was absorbed in looking at one of his Tarot decks, with an expression on her face that he recognized; he had learned to trust that look of thoughtful intuition, and he said:  “Find something that interests you?”

            She looked up at him, then edged out one of the cards and turned it to show him.

            The Fool.

            A knot in his spirit suddenly untied itself, and he remembered with a rush how he had fallen in love with her, how despite her terror she had taken that step over the cliff, over and over when it was required of her.  He nodded; then he held out the crystal sphere for her inspection.  She took it in her hand and cupped it.  “Yeah,” she said softly.

            “Right then.”  He took the deck from her and sorted through it till he found all four aces; they needed all the grounding that was going.

            Without discussing it, they moved to the place under the chandelier, the scene of Elisabeth’s earlier triumph and his acknowledged heartbreak, and sat down tailor-fashion across from one another.  Elisabeth chose to sit with her back to the closed priesthole: he was not certain, but he thought he knew what that said about how she perceived that threat.  She had lost color again.

            Rupert laid the four aces in a diamond square, with deliberate precision, and set the sphere in the center.  Fire, air, earth, and water.  Then he laid the Fool next to them, at her right hand and his left, their dominant side.  He looked up: and their eyes met.  For a moment a nightmare future stretched out before Rupert’s mind’s eye: losing her, losing himself, irremediable desolation.  Then his vision cleared and he said hoarsely:  “Lay your hands open and focus on the sphere.”

            She lowered her gaze and did as he said.  He watched, drinking in what might be his last sight of her sane and reachable: he thought of what the First had said about her, and what the First had probably said _to_ her, wearing her face.

            He began to speak the words that would draw her under, saw the focus of her eyes hone on a point so small it became invisible and her gaze opaque.  He felt her give the burden of her consciousness into his own open hands; his tears blurred her image and spilled down his face, but his voice held steady.

            He could go with her to a point, and did: for years he had nursed misgivings about other people trusting him, and he knew now that though he could not control the possibility of his own failure, he too must play the Fool.

            There came the moment when Elisabeth must leave him behind as she drew inward; her eyes closed, and he waited, breathing shallowly, for her to reach what she sought.  She began to tremble lightly, then harder; slowly the calm ebbed from her face and was replaced by the hard grief that lay on the far side of fear.  She shook as though she might tear apart, but made no sound.  Rupert watched, breathless.

            She went rigid, and drew in a sharp sob of a breath; her eyes watered from under her lashes as if from some great effort.  Suddenly, she shuddered upright and her eyes opened, blank and unseeing.  Caught on the brink of anguish, he watched; and then she blinked, and her eyes were meeting his, and she made a small sound, like a child waking from a nightmare.

            For only a second Rupert’s breath remained suspended; then he swept aside the cards and the sphere and held his arms open to her.  She came to him and burrowed her face hard against his chest, and he bore her up, both of them shaking together.

            Almost at once she relaxed into a limpness of relief, and sagged in his arms.  He unfolded his legs and let her sink down with her head in his lap, her face nested on his thighs.  Within the space of a breath she was profoundly asleep.

            He stroked her mussed hair back from her temple, combing it with his trembling fingers.  At the hairline he could see the faint line of white scar left from the night she had died in the doorway to her old home.  One of his tears dropped upon the soft round of her cheek and rolled; he wiped it away.

            He wanted to say to her, _I see what you have done.  I see that you did it for me, too._  He wanted to say:  _I don’t think you’re deficient, or a child, or a coward_.  He wanted to say:  _Thank you_.

            Rupert sat while the light changed and dimmed to late afternoon, and Elisabeth lay still across his lap in a stunned sleep.  From time to time he combed her hair with his fingers, and meditated on the new and free space his breath had found.  When he heard what must be the sound of the car returning down the lane, he reached at last to move her.  “Let’s get you upstairs,” he said, hoisting her awkwardly upward; as he’d hoped, she woke just enough for him to maneuver them both to their feet so he could walk her upstairs.  She submitted to his guidance, putting one numb foot above the other on the stairs, and collapsed again on their bed, where he took off her shoes and spread an afghan over her.  The print of his jeans was pink on her skin.  He kissed her marked cheek, turned on her lamp for when she woke, and went downstairs, just as the front door opened to admit all the noise and life of his guests.

 

*

 

She must have been ready to wake, because she came easily up from the depths of sleep when Rupert sat at her side on the bed.  The bedside lamp shone in the way it could only do at night; in its thick yellow light she saw a plate with a thick sandwich on it and a cup of milky tea sitting waiting for her.

            “You don’t have to keep feeding me like this, you know,” she said in a soft croak.

            “I know,” he said, humor in his voice.  His hand stroked her shoulder.

            She drew in a long breath and wriggled to sit up.  He picked up the tea and held it ready for her.  When she could, she accepted the cup and took a long pull at its hot sweetness.  “Here’s a sandwich for you,” Rupert said.

            “I’ll spoil my dinner,” she protested faintly.

            “Dinner’s long past, dear heart.”

            She blinked and looked around: the sky through the windows was indeed black.  “How long did I sleep?”  Before he could answer that, she followed that question with another:  “Did all our guests go home?”

            “Oh, no,” he smiled.  “They’re all downstairs making exceeding merry.”

            “Some hostess I am,” Elisabeth said.

            “Eat your sandwich,” Rupert said.

            She snorted a laugh, but he didn’t have to tell her twice: she was ravenous.  He held her tea for her while she put the plate on her lap and ate the sandwich in large hungry bites: beef and two kinds of cheese, and soft bread.  “So everyone’s here?” she asked him with her mouth full.

            He nodded.  “Andrew got in fine, and they picked up Anne on the way back.”

            “I’ll be glad to see them,” she said fervently, and took another bite, following it with a drink of tea.

            When she had come to the end of the sandwich, and sat back replete with the rest of the tea, she let Rupert catch her eye.

            “What can you tell me?” he asked softly.

            There was much she could tell him; there was nothing she could tell him.  Elisabeth chose her words slowly.  “I can tell you that Anne was right,” she began.

            “She usually is,” Rupert said dryly.

            “She was right; the First had more to fear from my darkness than I did.  The womb of creation, she called it.  Still—” Elisabeth shuddered— “if I never go back there again it’ll be too soon.”

            He made no answer, but sat with his eyes resting in hers.  A new sensation had begun to make itself felt to her, and she sat patiently, teasing out what it meant—this new buoyancy, this fluidity and liberty.  She was…free.  What she and Rupert had done had made them free of one another.  The disaster in Sunnydale had sealed them together in horror, and they had compounded the seal with love.  The love remained, but the seal had gone.  All this she grasped, inarticulately, and felt both exhilarated and frightened.

            “D’you feel ready to go down?” he asked her.

            She thought about it.  “Shower first, I think,” she said.

            “All right,” Rupert said, gathering her plate and cup.  “I’ll go down and make sure nobody’s bagged the last of the eggnog.”

            “Ha!” Elisabeth said.  “Better hurry then.”

            Before he got up, he leaned forward and kissed her mouth: a soft, sweet, chaste kiss.  “Thank you,” he whispered before he pulled away and rose to his feet.

            And that was how she knew he felt it too.

 

*

 

If Anne wanted to be honest with herself, she knew she wanted to see the priesthole; so she was content when Brian demanded to be shown it as soon as they got to Pyke’s Lea.  Andrew, the young man, was no less enthusiastic; and so Buffy volunteered to pull the bookcase open again and shine the large torch down the staircase for all their benefits.  Rupert vetoed any suggestion of their taking anyone down for a tour till the place had been more thoroughly examined, much to Andrew’s disappointment.

            They unloaded Andrew’s luggage from the boot of Brian’s car, but Rupert asked them to leave it in the hall and not take it upstairs to the room they’d fixed for him till Elisabeth was awake.  She was taking a well-earned nap, Rupert explained.  Buffy looked worried, Anne noticed; but Rupert’s face was calm.

            Elisabeth slept through dinner.  Brian began to look worried as well; but Rupert looked, if anything, even more satisfied than he had at first.

            After dinner Buffy ushered them into the newly-finished lounge and brought in a tray of desserts; Rupert tempted them all with aged scotch, brandy, and eggnog with Lord only knew what alcohol in it.  Anne took a brandy and subsided into the new armchair.  She still felt fragile, though less unnerved in this house than before the priesthole’s discovery.  Fortunately for her dignity, Brian and Buffy were very entertaining, and no one looked askance at her.

            Rupert excused himself after a little, and went upstairs; and a little while after that he came back down with an empty plate and a teacup and looked in to tell them to save Elisabeth some eggnog.  “Oh, damn!” Brian teased him, “it’s all gone.”  “It better not be!” Rupert said, and went away with the dishes.

            “It’s very good eggnog,” Andrew said, looking somewhat blank and dizzy.

            “How much of that have you had?” Buffy demanded, grabbing the punch bowl.

            “Only three cups,” Andrew said, looking toward her with a gesture like an infant’s, as if his head were too heavy to move accurately.

            “Three cups!” Buffy yelped.  “Of Giles’s eggnog?”

            “God Almighty,” Brian said.  “Two’s a skinful.”

            “Quick, Brian! Make him some coffee.”

            Anne watched them dart to Andrew’s rescue—they’d had their own share of alcohol—and fought a smile with difficulty.

            “I can hold my liquor,” Andrew said, with dignity.  And it was true that although he looked very dizzy indeed, his voice was quite measured and clear.

            They were dosing a very reluctant Andrew with coffee when Elisabeth came in, her hair wet and bound up in a neat bun.  She looked pale and tired, as if she had just given birth to a very difficult bit of good news.  Buffy was not too distracted to study her narrowly, and Anne received confirmation in Buffy’s sudden expression of relief.

            Elisabeth greeted them all with handshakes and smiles, helped herself to eggnog, and talked quite pleasantly of the approaching midnight.  Rupert came in with a box of crackers, and she teased him about the potency of his eggnog.  Rupert offered an apology, but he looked rather complacent as he sat down in one of the armchairs; Elisabeth got up amused, and announced an intention to serve out more coffee before midnight came.  On her way out she paused to bend over Rupert and kiss his temple.  Anne saw the expression on Rupert’s face when she touched him; and saw, too, Buffy’s expression across the room, watching them.  It occurred to her suddenly that this young woman, so formidable in her strength and resolve, must know a loneliness like that of Anne’s own calling.  Buffy also must feel a small sword at the happiness of her friends; must know the pain of being shut out of a consummation she had chosen not to pursue.

            Good heavens, Anne thought suddenly, I must not be any too sober myself.  She was glad when Elisabeth came in with the coffee pot and a tray of cups.

            It was getting close to midnight, and their hilarity had not flagged.  “More coffee?” Elisabeth asked Andrew, gesturing with the pot as Brian handed out crackers.

            “I don’t need any more,” Andrew said, a little petulantly.  “I can hold my liquor just fine.  Mr. Robson says—”  He broke off.  There was a sudden silence.

            “What about Robson?” Buffy said slowly.

            “Crap,” Andrew said, shooting a hunted glance at Rupert, who had caught both Buffy’s and Elisabeth’s eye in turn.  “I wasn’t supposed to say anything about—”

            “Oh my God,” Elisabeth said, sitting up straight and putting down the coffee pot.  “Has he been pulling a Palpatine on you?”

            “No!” Andrew cried.  “He’s not evil, he’s good—he’s been teaching me—”  He stopped again at the grim looks gathering around him, and a new expression came over his face as he realized he’d said exactly what they would have expected.

            “Looks like we’ve found our leak,” Buffy said quietly.

            “I don’t get it,” Brian said.  “Who’s Robson?”

            Elisabeth looked over at him, but it was Anne who answered.  “He’s a Watcher,” Anne said.

            Brian’s face darkened, as it always did at the mention of Watchers.

            Anne ignored Rupert’s thoughtful look.  Elisabeth said gently:  “Andrew, have you been telling Mr. Robson things about your work?”

            “You mean he’s been using me?” Andrew put down his coffee cup with a clank and stood up unsteadily.  Which was answer enough.

            Andrew swung round to look at Rupert.  “Is that why he didn’t want me to mention him to you?”  Rupert merely looked at him ruefully: Andrew looked at Buffy, who was plaiting her fingers thoughtfully in her lap.

            “Andrew,” she said, “you knew about Xander’s shadow man, didn’t you?”

            “Someone’s shadowing Xander?”  The boy paled.  “I wouldn’t hurt Xander.  You know I wouldn’t!”

            “But you told Robson where he was,” Buffy said, inexorably.

            “But—” Andrew’s face went hard.  “I can’t believe this.  I’ve been used.  Again!”

            “You’re not the only one it’s happened to,” Rupert said, but the comfort fell flat.

            “But I’m the one he picked.  I’m the one he picked,” he repeated, louder.  “Because I’m the weak link.”

            “Nobody thinks that,” Elisabeth said, and at the same time Buffy said, “It’s our fault for leaving you without a partner,” but Andrew ignored them both.

            “I’m sick of being everybody’s dupe.”  His voice cracked.  “From the Watchers to the First Fucking Evil—and _don’t you laugh at me_,” he said savagely to Rupert.

            “I’m not,” Rupert replied, going serious at once.  “I was merely thinking of certain passages of my youth.”

            “I’m not your mirror image,” Andrew raged.  “And I’m not your apprentice.”

            Rupert’s gentleness was as inexorable as Buffy’s.  “Most good Watchers have expressed such a sentiment,” he said.

            “Then maybe I don’t want to be one!”  Andrew pushed his way, stumbling, round the coffee table and stormed out of the room.  A moment later the heavy front door slammed.

            Before the silence had time to settle, Rupert looked at Buffy and cut his eyes toward the door.  She nodded grimly, and got up to follow.  The door shut more quietly behind her.

            Elisabeth was still sitting upright, but she looked blank.  “Well,” she said.

            Rupert was looking thoughtful.  Brian was looking at Anne.

            “How,” Brian said, “did you know this Robson bloke is a Watcher?”

            Anne closed her eyes and sighed.

            “The Robsons are something like third cousins once removed,” she said.  “I haven’t met him, but I know who he is.”

            “Your family are Watchers?” Elisabeth said, in wonder.

            “Not my immediate family.  A branch up the tree.”  Anne decided she might as well make a complete confession.  “The Watchers nearer related to me were all exterminated, of course; but they have—had—an old heritage.  They were related, I believe, to another Catholic Watcher family called Bartholomae.”

            They stared at her.  Brian spoke finally, in a slow voice.  “You mean to say,” he demanded, “that I did all that research on this bloody house…and _I could have just bloody well asked you_?”

            Anne shook her head.  “I didn’t know about the house,” she hastened to say.  “I didn’t know the Bartholomaes built it till Rupert told me the details of your exorcism.  But I heard the name and the pieces, as they say, fell together.”  She kept her eyes on her coffee cup.  But in the silence that followed, she looked up at Elisabeth, too afraid of what she would see not to meet it.

            “Huh,” Elisabeth said.

            “Oh,” Rupert sighed, “dear.”

 

*

 

Buffy buttoned up Elisabeth’s coat as she followed Andrew down the lane and over the receding drifts of crunchy snow.  He had taken the lane at a run, but she could still see his shadowed figure moving down the road in a pelting walk, his breath coming out in volleys of vapor in the sharp air.  She kept him in sight and did not hurry; she wanted to think.

            It was very tempting to think of Andrew as someone more trouble than he was worth, someone who could just be written off.  But it was no longer possible, even if he hadn’t joined the Murderer’s Club, as she had spat at Angel.  Buffy felt a twist of grief.  Everybody was in that club now, it seemed:  Andrew, Giles, Willow, Angel, Faith…only Xander had not killed another human being—and judging from his email, he did not see himself as being able to dodge that bullet much longer.  Dawn had been afraid of her power as long as she’d known of it; Elisabeth, too, was afraid of what she could do.  Buffy had ceased to be afraid of her own power: that had been the First’s plan, and though it had backfired, it wasn’t like it hadn’t taken its toll.

            No, Andrew was definitely one of them now, obnoxious and naïve as he was.  Robson had messed with one of her people.  She hadn’t decided yet how he was going to pay, but as far as Buffy was concerned it was a done deal.  And if Robson was responsible for Xander’s danger, he’d have to pay twice.

            She was catching up with Andrew on the road: he had paused in the light of the lamp at the head of the next lane to clutch at his side, breathing heavily.  He hadn’t taken a coat; he was wearing only the thin sweater he’d had on when he got off the plane.  Buffy lengthened her stride.

            Andrew heard her coming and started again, though he was still winded.  Buffy kept moving till she was almost even with him, matching his pace.

            “Go—” he uttered— “away—”  There were tears on his face, and Buffy thought suddenly, this is a Moment for him.  It wasn’t for her; but she had recently had one, and under this very sky.  You didn’t mess with other people’s Moments, and if there hadn’t been so much at stake, she would have gone away as he asked.  Buffy thought of the look on Giles’s face, which Andrew had interpreted as amusement, and treaded carefully.

            “I can’t go away, Andrew,” she said finally.  “It’s dangerous to be alone out here.”

            “What do you care?”  He spat the words at her, awkward in his very fury.  “I’d be better off dead.”

            “Bullshit,” Buffy said evenly.

            Andrew stumbled on.  They had left the pale cast of light and entered the shadow between it and the next, a hundred yards down the curving road.  The snow, so soft on the night it fell, was now hard and resisted their treads.

            “It’s not bullshit,” Andrew said, when he had breath enough.  “I’m more trouble than I’m worth, aren’t I?”  He made it an accusation.  Buffy didn’t answer; it was true enough that she had thought it, and even if she had thought it only to deny it, that wouldn’t help him.

            “I’m not—” Andrew went on— “any use to people—just to—their enemies.”  His voice broke on the last word and he stumbled to a halt.  A sharp eddy of wind plucked at his sweater, and he shivered hard.  They could have been the only two people in Oxfordshire.

            “You’re all always going to hate me,” he said, in a voice that buried a wail of despair.  Buffy shook her head mutely, and he said, “And why not?  I’m a freak, a geek, and—something that rhymes with ‘geek’ and means ‘traitor’.”

            Buffy couldn’t resist it.  “Sneak?” she offered.

            Andrew barked a short laugh, but he was too angry to be undone.  So Buffy stood and waited.  Finally he spoke again, and a pleading note came into his voice.

            “I thought I was helping,” he said.  “I thought—if I could be the one who brings everyone together….He—he said that forces for good should work together, but sometimes personalities got in the way.  He said that Mr. Giles and he didn’t get along, but…. Why does he hate the Council?”

            “Giles?” Buffy asked, though Andrew could hardly mean anybody else.  “Well, you know about the Council, don’t you?  It’s not that they’re bad, it’s just that they want to be the only good guys in the room.  They tried to kill me and Faith.  It’s hard for Giles.  He’s a Watcher, but he knows better than they do.  Good is complicated, Andrew.  It’s evil that’s simple.”

            Andrew was silent for a moment.  Then:  “He made me feel valuable.”

            The little pang hit Buffy again.  That was what Giles had wanted; it was what she had wanted.  Willow and Xander, her best friends, had wanted it.  Why was it such a hard thing to find, or to give?

            Her silence made Andrew burst out:  “Is it wrong?  Do I have to beat it down every time?  Do I have to treat it like it’s evil?”

            “It’s just something we want,” Buffy said helplessly, thinking that whatever she said would only make things worse.  But at the ‘we,’ Andrew went very still.

            “It’s just something we want,” Buffy said again, “and sometimes other people use it to manipulate us.”  _Like Warren did to you_, she thought.  _Like the First did to all of us_.

            “Like I did to Jonathan,” Andrew said, and began to weep quietly.

            He was turned toward her and away from the far-off light, and his face was in shadow.  But she could see his bowed head, and his trembling, and the faint heave of his shoulders as he stood grieving.  He had spoken not a single mythological word, made not a single attempt to cast this moment as part of some heroic story.  Perhaps, Buffy thought, he was realizing that there are other kinds of stories besides the heroic.  Perhaps he wasn’t thinking of stories at all; after all, these tears weren’t going to solve a Hellmouthy problem.  They were just tears, and that was significance enough.

            Presently Andrew raised his head and swiped at his nose with the back of his hand.  “What am I going to do?” he asked her.

            Buffy shrugged.  “Do what you want.”

            “I…I don’t know what that is.”  His voice was hoarse.

            She remained silent, and he said, “I don’t want to join the Council.”

            “No.”  She hadn’t expected he would.

            “I d-don’t know if I can keep Mr. Robson away from me.”

            “Why don’t you let me worry about that part,” Buffy said.  “And let’s get back to the house.  You’re going to die of hypothermia out here.”

            Andrew was indeed shivering violently, from cold or self-discovery or both.  “O-kay,” he uttered, hugging himself.  She turned to go back, and he turned with her.

            “That’s the problem with storming out dramatically,” Andrew said, with a faint return of his usual air of confidential enthusiasm.  “It’s kind of an anticlimax to come back and get your coat.”

            Buffy gave a short laugh.

 

*

 

Elisabeth helped Rupert bring the last of the cups into the kitchen, where Anne was already wrapping and sealing things to put away.  “Well, midnight came and went,” Rupert said with a glance at the clock, “and we didn’t even notice it.”

            “Not that there weren’t fireworks,” Elisabeth said.  “I’m taking Brian upstairs to get Andrew’s room finished.”  She turned, and was gone.

            Rupert hadn’t blinked at Elisabeth’s declaration; there seemed to be no question that the plans would go forward as made, as if Andrew’s gaffe were merely a social solecism and not an upheaval of their entire trust in him.  But, Anne thought, this was probably for the best.  Continuing to accept Andrew would probably make him more tractable in the long run.

            She kept her hands moving, wrapping the remainder of the cheese from dessert in its cloth and putting it with the other things to go back in the refrigerator.  But of course that would not stop Rupert from looking at her; or from speaking.

            “You didn’t tell me,” he said quietly.

            She stilled her hands and looked up at him.  “No,” she answered.

            There was no excuse to give, so she gave none, merely looked back at him.  His face was calm, his gaze gentle; it was impossible to tell if he were hurt, though she thought she could sense he was not angry.  Anne realized that this was a moment in which he indisputably had the moral high ground over her: and yet she felt that he was reluctant to claim it, as if he felt an obligation to renounce his advantage.

            “There was no chance I would ever have been a Watcher,” Anne told him.  “My side of the family were already distancing themselves from their cousins.  If I’d been born male, there would have been no objection to my taking holy orders; but I wasn’t.  When I left Rome, I lost them, Watchers and civilians and all.”

            “Did it have to be that way?” he asked her, not even pretending not to know the answer.

            “Probably not,” Anne said evenly.  “But it was.”

            He nodded, and his gaze dropped to the middle distance.

            They heard the front door open, and the clatter of feet into the house.  After a moment Andrew came into the kitchen, violently shivering, with Buffy behind him, shrugging out of Elisabeth’s wool frock coat.  She folded it over her arm and stood in the doorway.  Her face was pink from cold; Andrew’s, from cold and crying.  He went to the roll of paper towels by the sink and racketed off an awkward couple of pieces.

            Buffy was looking at Rupert.  Rupert looked back at her impassively, then at Andrew.

            “Wh-what are you going to do with me?”  Andrew’s shivering had not abated much, and he was making heavy weather of wiping his nose.

            “Nothing, tonight,” Rupert said.  “I expect you and I will need to have some conversations in the near future about what you gave away.”

            Fresh tears rose in the boy’s eyes, but he gathered himself straight to his lanky height and nodded.  Rupert regarded him with equanimity for a moment, then asked:  “What did he offer you?”

            “He was going to train me,” Andrew said.

            “As a Watcher?”

            “Sort of,” Andrew said, refolding the wad of paper towel and wiping at his nose again.  “He said Watchers are different now…in some ways.  Not in others.”

            “He’s not wrong about that,” Rupert murmured, half to himself.  Then:  “And he’s not wrong that you need proper training.”

            Andrew said bitterly, “I guess he was never going to do it.”

            “Maybe,” Rupert said, voicing Anne’s own thought.  “He has his own ideas of honor.  Still,” he went on briskly, “it’s probably best if I handle the training from here on in.”

            “You didn’t want to before,” Andrew accused.

            Rupert’s answer echoed Anne’s earlier simple admission.  “No.”

            “It’s because you feel sorry for me,” Andrew said, his voice raw.

            Rupert made no attempt to affirm or deny it, merely looked the boy in the eye; and after a moment Andrew dropped his gaze and nodded.

            “Upstairs,” Rupert said gently, “you will find Elisabeth and Brian making you a bedroom in the office.”

            With a long sniff and a final shiver, Andrew gave a last nod and went out.

            A small silence reigned; then Buffy spoke.  “I don’t know about you, but I think I’m too tired to hash all this out tonight.”

            Rupert nodded and sighed.  “Morning’s good enough for making long-term plans.”

            “Short term,” Buffy said, “I’m going to text Will so she knows who to keep an eye on.  That might help Xander some.”  A bit of worry crept into her voice.  Anne roused herself.

            “I’m tired as well,” she said.  “And I’ve got a service for the Holy Name tomorrow.”

            Buffy gave her a puzzled look, but didn’t ask the question.  Rupert said, “I’m sure Brian will be ready to leave soon.”

            _Yes_, Anne thought, _and with any luck he’ll be too tired to interrogate me about my Watcher side of the family_.

            She felt achingly tired, and a little depressed; but as they went out of the kitchen Rupert rested his hand on her shoulder from behind, for a brief moment; she reached up to touch his fingers, and was comforted.

 

*

 

The house was quiet.  Everyone had gone to bed, and the last lights put out.  Andrew shifted uncomfortably on his air mattress and tried to make himself go to sleep; but it still hurt too much.  He chewed his lower lip to stop new tears from coming.

            A shadow nosed open the door, which he had not firmly shut, and slipped into the room.  Andrew went very still and waited; and the cat leapt up onto the mattress and came toward his head, its feet making small puff-sounds on the bed as it stepped.  It hunkered down close to him; Andrew could see the faint outline of its ears in the darkness.  He thought: _he’s here to make sure I don’t hurt anybody_.  His eyes grew wet again, but he reached gingerly to pet the top of the soft head.  To his relief the cat’s ears lifted to accommodate his touch, and it started a very small purr.

            After a few minutes the cat nestled closer to him, warming him, and Andrew stroked the soft fur till he grew tired, and went to sleep.

 

*

 

Elisabeth’s sleep was peaceful.  For once she felt free to relax where she lay, not curled half-hedgehog and edging toward fetal.  So when she woke to Rupert’s trembling, she found herself on her back, all her muscles quiet; and it cost her nothing to reach next to her and touch him.  He drew in a sharp breath and startled; then rolled over and slipped a hand over her, to take refuge close against her.

            Elisabeth raised her arm to draw him in and settle him so that his head lay in the hollow of her shoulder, under her jaw.  She stroked his hair, lightly, but still he trembled, in bursts of shaking that she could not fully absorb against her body.

            After a long time, he spoke quietly, his voice by contrast very calm.  “Damn,” he said.  “How tiresome this is.”

            She smiled in the darkness, and combed his hair with her fingertips.

            “Don’t fash yourself,” she said.  “You had a difficult day.”

            “_You_ should talk,” he said.

            “I know.”

            He sighed.  “I’ll be good for nothing in the morning.”

            “Maybe you won’t need to be,” Elisabeth said.  “You should rest anyway, you know.”

            “And let everyone else carry the weight of our Watcher problem, perhaps?  Though it seems there are more people with the experience to do it than I thought.”

            “I was rather shocked by Anne’s little revelation,” Elisabeth agreed; “but I wasn’t really surprised.”

            Rupert grunted softly.

            “And of course, Knowles offered _me_ a job as a Watcher, that day I was at the Council.”

            He half-raised his head.  “You didn’t tell me that!”

            “Didn’t I?  Yes, after the scene in front of the dais, I was taken to his office, still in that damned white robe, and he gave me a very dry little look and made the offer.  He wasn’t surprised when I refused.  But I laughed.”  Elisabeth gave a little sigh.  “Poor Andrew.”

            Rupert snorted.

            “It’s funny I didn’t tell you, when we talked afterward, in my flat.  But it’s hard to remember what we said then.”

            “Yes,” Rupert said.  “I suppose you were too busy trying to get rid of me to remember to mention it.”

            “Oh, Rupert!” she said, on a sharp inbreath, and they both stiffened.

            “Sorry,” he muttered at once, “sorry—I didn’t mean—”

            “_Don’t_ say you didn’t mean it.”

            “No,” he agreed, and after a breath tried again.  “I didn’t mean to carry my bitterness so long.  I didn’t feel that way at the time.  I didn’t, till later.”

            Elisabeth made herself relax.  She began stroking Rupert’s hair again; but the little pain hadn’t gone away, and she knew he could tell.

            “Dammit,” he said, burrowing miserably against her.  “I—”  But he stopped.

            “No, I get it,” she said slowly.  “It’s a little…a little bit like that time I said I wished I had died back in Sunnydale.”

            He sighed and nodded.

            “I didn’t say it to hurt you.  But it did.”

            “Yes,” he said.  Then:  “And I remember what I said, too.  I told you what you could do to make it up to me.”

            The unspoken invitation lay heavy in the air, as if he had raised his head to look at her, though he had not.  Elisabeth went still, with her hand in his hair.  She swallowed; and then she spoke.

            “Let me handle Robson.”

            He was silent, and she waited patiently for him to think it over.

            “Buffy will want to take a hand,” he said finally.

            “My plan involves Buffy,” Elisabeth said, calm.

            “You have a plan, then?”

            She hadn’t, until this moment.  “Yeah,” she said.

            Rupert gave a long sigh.  “I think you are right,” he said.  “I would be too tempted to…well.”

            “Kill him?” Elisabeth supplied, with equanimity.

            “Probably,” Rupert said.  His voice held a note of relief that she had said it for him, and of sadness that she had been able to guess.

            Elisabeth turned her face to him, to kiss his hair gently.  “I love you,” she said.

            She felt him breathe out and relax in her arms.  “I know.”

 

*

 

Across the kitchen table, in the early morning light, Buffy curled her hands around her coffee cup and thought about it.  Elisabeth waited.

            “Yeah,” Buffy said finally.  “I think you’re right.  I think we’ll have to start there.”

            “Okay,” Elisabeth said.

            “And I’ll work on the arrangements for moving Andrew to Rome.  In the meantime….”

            “In the meantime we can move him into my flat.  We’ve pretty much completed the move to Pyke’s Lea now; and Rupert intends to do a lot of work with him, so it will be convenient to have him close.”

            Buffy nodded.  “Do you want me to call Brian and explain his part in the plan to him?”

            “Do that,” Elisabeth said, pushing her chair back to rise.  “I’ve got to dig out my contact number.”

            “Okay.”  Buffy got up too; and Elisabeth carried her tea into the dining room, where her laptop and books and notebook lay piled in a corner.

            She flipped carefully through her notebook, looking for the number she had written on one of the unnumbered blank pages.  At last she found it, and, glancing at the clock, took it to the table and got out her phone.

            Ring.  Ring.  “Heathbend Clinic,” said a cool female voice.

            “Yes,” Elisabeth said; “I’d like to speak with Dr. Kettering-Carter, please.”


	13. The Fire and the Rose

_The end is where we start from._

_We shall not cease from exploration_

_And the end of all our exploring_

_Will be to arrive where we started_

_And know the place for the first time._

_—_T. S. Eliot_, Four Quartets_

 

“I thought Elisabeth said she didn’t want to be in on things,” Dawn said.

            Buffy sighed and shifted comfortably on her bed, moving the cellphone to her other ear.  “I think that’s changed now.  It was kinda inevitable.”  This was the problem with all of them being scattered everywhere; she had to explain and report things several times over.  Buffy often found herself taking refuge in shorthand.

            “Is Giles okay?”  Buffy noticed her sister didn’t say, _Is Giles okay with that?_  Which ought to have been what she was asking, but wasn’t.  Buffy chose her answer carefully.

            “I don’t think he likes not being in the driver’s seat when it comes to us and the Council.”  An understatement, to judge from the fights they had had about it in the past six months.  “But he wants to move on.  Or move back—or just _move_.  Instead of, you know, complete paralysis.  Elisabeth can help with that.”

 

*

 

And Andrew wouldn’t realize it, but he was helping too.  New Year’s day, Giles’s first concrete action had been to sit Andrew down at the dining table and then go to fetch his old and battered chess set.  When he put it down on the table, Andrew perked up.

            “Ah,” he said sagely, “the Jedi’s game.”

            Elisabeth, at Giles’s shoulder moving her laptop and books out of the way, straightened to lift her hand in an imitation of Alec Guinness’s gesture.  “You don’t want to be using too many Star Wars metaphors.”

            “I don’t want to be using too many Star Wars metaphors,” Andrew repeated, suppressing a grin.  From the kitchen doorway, Buffy snorted.

            “Even though I started it,” Elisabeth said.

            “Even though you started it,” Andrew repeated.

            “Oh, for God’s sake,” Giles said.

            “You can say that again,” Elisabeth said.  (Andrew opened his mouth, but at a glare from Giles, he shut it again.)  “You’ve just done me out of my table.  _Now_ where am I going to work?”

            Giles looked up at her innocently.  “In your cubby in Oxford, perhaps?”

            When Buffy had first arrived, she would have read the subtext merely as a veiled effort to get rid of Elisabeth for an afternoon.  Now, she knew that Giles was prodding Elisabeth to shake off her fear and get properly to work.

            Elisabeth clearly knew it too.  She made a moue at him and went to get her satchel.

            There was more than one reason for Elisabeth to switch gears.  Giles had come downstairs soon after Elisabeth had reached the good doctor on the phone; he sat down quietly at the dining table as Elisabeth paced and spoke, and Buffy knew when he realized whom she was talking to, because he gave a great snort and folded his arms comfortably.  After enduring a brief inquiry by proxy after his health (“The doctor wants to know if you’ve been avoiding spears like you’re supposed to”), Giles listened carefully to the rest of the conversation, and after Elisabeth’s phone clicked shut, he and Buffy and Elisabeth had gone over the plan.  Buffy noticed that although Elisabeth’s voice was calm, there were faint signs of strain in her face.

            Then Andrew came down, hesitatingly, and Giles’s gaze honed on him.

            As Andrew set up the chess pieces under Giles’s critical eye, Elisabeth came back into the room wearing her coat and scarf, and swinging her satchel onto her shoulder.  “All right,” she said, “I’m going.”

            “You’ve got your phone?” Giles asked.  Buffy startled at the implication; despite her urges to patrol, no place she’d been had ever felt as safe as Oxford.

            “Yes,” Elisabeth said, “charged up and everything.”

            “Watch your back,” Giles said.

            “I will.”

            As she turned and left the room, Giles watched with an odd look on his face—wistful, affectionate, uncertain.  There were things going on, Buffy thought, between Elisabeth and Giles; new things, that had as much to do with the changing nature of their relationship as with the problem at hand.

            But Giles did not watch after Elisabeth long.  He turned back to Andrew, who had set up the pieces and made his opening move.

            “Now,” he said softly, “tell me about the first time you met Mr. Robson,” and reached for a black pawn.

 

*

 

“So they’re not breaking up, then,” Dawn said.  Her voice was flat, but it was still a question.

            This was one thing Buffy was pretty sure she knew the answer to.  “No.”

            “Well, who _would_ break up with Giles?” Dawn added, as if the answer were so obvious that anyone who thought otherwise was stupid.  Buffy was torn between two distracting thoughts—one, that _everybody_ seemed to have a simmering chemistry of some kind with Giles, including her little sister, which was gross; and two—

            “I’m not so sure it’s a guaranteed given that someone wouldn’t want to break up with him,” Buffy said, thinking of the few weeks she had just been through.

            “Buffy, I think you should stop being so hard on him.”  Dawn was using her quiet, severe tone.

            “I’m not being hard,” Buffy said, “I’m being realistic.  I love Giles.  That’s how I know he can be hard to live with.”

            Dawn was not giving out convinced vibes, but she must have heard the softness in Buffy’s own tone, because she didn’t pursue the point.  Instead she said:  “You like her.”

            Buffy said indignantly, “Why does everyone sound surprised that I like Giles’s girlfriend?  Am I that much of a bitch to everybody?”

            “Well, no,” Dawn replied, practical, “but even I noticed you going into hyper-protecto mode when you first met her.”

            “Are you sure nobody thought it was just jealousy?”  Buffy pressed her, steely-voiced.

            “Not _just_ jealousy,” Dawn said, completely unstartled.

            “Did Xander say that to you too?” Buffy demanded.

            “Say what?”  Dawn sounded puzzled.

            “Never mind,” Buffy said.

            “Okay,” Dawn said, “I’ll get it out of him.”

            “Don’t you dare.”

            Buffy could hear her sister grinning.

            “It can’t be just jealousy,” Dawn said, “because you would have been even more uber-defensive about Giles being hot if it were.  Plus, you’d be working harder to get his attention.  I mean, you’re already prettier than her.”

            “How do you know?” Buffy said, ignoring the _uber-defensive_ and the _Giles being hot_.  “You’ve never met her in person.”

            “Willow,” Dawn said simply.

            “Like it’s any of her business either.”  It seemed odd to Buffy that anyone would blatantly consider physical attractiveness such a factor.  But maybe this was like Marie Antoinette let-them-eat-cake-ing people who didn’t have bread.  She felt embarrassed.  Still, it had been a long time since she considered the physical properties of anyone beyond their ability to attack or defend themselves.  Or outside the context of their current feelings:  Buffy remembered Elisabeth’s face in the church on Christmas Eve, and relaxed into firmer certainty.

            “Maybe you should come here next Christmas,” Buffy said.

            “Ha.  I knew you’d cave eventually.”

            Buffy had forgotten that she had argued with Dawn about her coming to Oxford.  “I said next Christmas, not this one.”

            “As long as there’s gonna _be_ a next Christmas.”

            Buffy thought of Robson; thought of the Slayers; thought of Angel.  “Right,” she agreed.

 

*

 

The review of literature had been long done, but Elisabeth was still compiling notes from books.  She had had to break off organizing her thesis to write the essays she had missed writing in the spring; and now that she had caught up her general work, it was time to get back to searching for that elusive backbone principle.  Like a key, she thought dryly.  Like a key or a stone or a sword or a cup, and Elisabeth thought of the Fool, the holy Fool who had gone looking for none of these things but had found them anyway.

            She tapped her pen on her notebook and let her eyes unfocus.  Rupert was playing chess with Andrew at home.  Andrew had known it meant training from the start; it had been moderately obvious.  What had not been obvious was what she had seen: that he had made the act of submission again, if not to his heritage as it once was, then to his heritage as it was going to be—to involving himself, to caring.  How hard that must have been for him, she thought, after the First threw it so hard in his face, like ground glass.  (There was another fairy tale, the Snow Queen—though whether it was she or Buffy who had played the Snow Queen was difficult to tell.) 

            And she was probably out of her mind to suggest herself as the leader for this scheme of parleying with Robson.  Did she really think she could forge a détente with the Council?  Well, she answered herself, as she had many times before, it’s this or going straight to war mode.  Which sounded like several orders of magnitude of no fun.  At least Dr Kettering-Carter had been amenable to her ideas; she had narrowly escaped death herself, from the sound of it.  Everybody had.  Even Anne had lost cousins, and she had been keeping herself at a far remove from the Watcher scene.  Elisabeth sighed.  It was an index of how much of a grip her nightmare had kept her in that she had not noticed, even after the event.  The nightmare, and the annoyingly perennial plague of self-preoccupation.  It was a miracle that Rupert had loved her long enough to help her get the freedom she had.

            Sighing again, Elisabeth reached for the book of essays that contained Professor Tolkien’s discussion of fairytale.  Andrew would like Tolkien’s essay, Elisabeth thought.  She would have him read it…if it didn’t interfere with Rupert’s training.  It might be hard enough to get Andrew into a practical state of mind without her throwing Tolkien into the mix.

            There was a blue sticky-note marking the essay, but as she opened the pages, she realized that though she had put it there, the writing on it was not hers.  It was Rupert’s.  He had written:

 

_te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras,_

_secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma_.

 

Elisabeth knew what “te amo” meant, and “secretamente,” “oscuras,” and “alma,” but she was not content simply to gloss it.  She took the sticky-note out of the book and, setting the book aside without a second glance, reached for her laptop.

            She discovered fairly readily that the quotation was Neruda, and she found the rest of the sonnet with no trouble.  But to get a reliable translation, she would need a book.

            Fortunately, she was in Oxford, where she could turn a tap and get hot and cold running books.  She dug into the catalog with alacrity, searching for an _en face_ translation of Neruda’s sonnets.

            There was one in the English Faculty library.  Elisabeth glanced around at her workspace.  Pack up or lock the valuables away?  Elisabeth decided simply to lock things up and run across to the other library.  She slung her coat over her shoulders and went off without buttoning it, the sticky-note in her hand.

            Though it was between terms, there were still plenty of familiar faces in College, students and dons rooting among their own papers in the hope that quiet breeds industry.  Elisabeth nodded at those she knew; they nodded back, some brightening a little, as if they were glad to be seen by her.  Elisabeth was startled afresh: how circumscribed her vision had been, to expect them only to drop her from their notice after her disgraceful breakdown.  The vague threat that had clung to the shadows of Magdalen since the bad time was released a little; people were not staring at her as at a monster.  Even that fellow she didn’t know, glancing back across the quad, was just a fellow, nothing less and nothing more.

            Wait.

            Elisabeth felt herself frown, and her heart beat faster.  She put the sticky-note in her coat pocket and was relieved to find her cell-phone jostling there.  With it still in her pocket, she hit Rupert’s speed dial number, then put her other hand in her other pocket, to wait.

            She let her peripheral vision tell her what she wanted to know, and as subtly as possible avoided blind corners.  But there was one ahead which she could not avoid, and she watched it as she approached, with her finger on the button ready to send the call to Rupert.

            Ten steps, and she’d be there.  Five.

            She looked.

            There was no one there.

            Elisabeth breathed out, and felt silly.  But she kept her finger on the call button.

            When she reached the EFL, she presented her credentials and went in search of the book.  But her mind was no longer wholly focused on tracking down Neruda.  She was thinking of the possibilities of shadows in Oxford.  The Council knew Oxford; many of its members had been Oxford men (she supposed a commensurate number had been Cambridge men, so it wasn’t as if she’d merely picked the wrong university to affiliate herself with).  Anyway, this wasn’t, strictly speaking, a place to hide.

            But it was a place to come awake.  Elisabeth’s vision cleared, and she located the spine of the book she wanted on the shelf and pulled it out.  She turned pages slowly until she found the sonnet; then glanced across for the translation.

 

_I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,_

_In secret, between the shadow and the soul._

 

Elisabeth went very still.  _It’s you that I love_, she had told him.  _Any you; every possible you_.  This was his answer.  This was his answer, to go with her to face her own darkness and to love her not in spite of but within it.

            She read the rest of the sonnet, slowly, then flipped through the pages to browse the others.  The sonnets breathed tenderness and intimacy, and a deep, wild hunger.  She read the lines as though Rupert had sent them all to her; then put the book quietly back in its place.

            Meditatively, with the thought of Watchers riding the surface of her consciousness, Elisabeth headed back to Magdalen.  She was thinking about Pyke’s Lea.  What Rupert had wanted, clearly, was a home.  She had wanted it along with him, but part of her had resisted, fearful that she might find a home and then lose it.  She couldn’t afford to indulge that fear now; and she didn’t want to.

            She thought about how their house had become a crossing-point for strands of a delicate web: the priesthole and her darkness; the Bartholomaes and her friend; the haunting and her family; Andrew and the Watchers. 

            When she reached the corner at which she had paused in coming, Elisabeth stopped to look at the spot that would have been blind to her.  The dampness of melting snow meant that the walks were wet in spots; and in the blind spot two footmarks stood drying, pointed in the direction she would come.

            Unbidden, the memory took hold of her for a split second, of the Iffley Road and a van she had just passed and strong arms wrapping her from behind to hold a pungent cloth to her face.  She made a sudden motion, breaking free from the physical memory, and moved on.

            She strode, quietly fuming, across the quad and back indoors and up the stairs to her cubby.  In the course of her planning she had come to think of her mission as an impersonal gambit, which had been helpful to clear her mind, but which was certainly not the whole story.  Maybe that was what was so infuriating about the Council, that they pretended that it was even though they groped and wrangled and grasped for the upper hand just like anyone else. 

            She and Rupert had both attempted impersonal gambits by dint of killing everything else—their tenderness for one another, their grief, their connectedness to their companions—and the First had wound up making excellent capital out of it.  Buffy, meanwhile, had swung wildly from one side of the pendulum to the other, and managed—just barely—to land on her feet.

            No, this problem, like the others, called for an integration, of a kind Elisabeth couldn’t shape yet in her mind.  She sat down at the desk, reached for the book of essays, and worked steadily till the daylight was gone.

 

*

 

She came home with the evening and let her satchel drop gently to the floor of the foyer.  Upstairs, she could hear voices: Buffy and Andrew, at work on something judging from the shifting and rumbling sounds that obscured their words.

            Elisabeth passed along the hall and into the dining room.  The table was set for dinner (four places), and in the center stood four wineglasses and an open bottle of a red wine.  Wearily, she sank into the chair that was hers and reached to help herself.

            The sound of wine pouring drew Rupert from the kitchen.  She looked up at him where he stood in the doorway, ready to ask him if he’d like her to pour his; but she stopped when their eyes met.  She felt obvious, as if he could read by her expression that she had seen his note; and she knew he had, because he dropped his eyes and blushed.  He was blushing.

            Elisabeth tucked away her wonder and said, “I see you haven’t poured your glass yet.  D’you want me to pour it?”

            “Please,” Rupert said softly, and went back into the kitchen.

            She followed him in a few moments later, carrying both their glasses.  When she handed him his, he took a brief sip of it and put it down.  “Mm, thank you,” he said, reaching to give a stir to the pan on the stove.

            “What’s for dinner?”  Elisabeth put her backside against the counter and sipped at her own glass.

            “Stir-fry.”

            So they would not be pledging one another with tonight’s wine, she thought; and they would not speak about the Neruda sonnet.  She might have felt disappointed, but she did not: whatever figure they were dancing, it was under the surface, _sub rosa_, and she was comforted.

            _Sub __rosa_.  An unrecognized thought tugged at the coatsleeve of her consciousness, and she stood quietly, sipping her wine and trying to tease it out of hiding.

            “Did you have any trouble?” Rupert asked her, opening a cabinet and sorting through a jumble of unsorted spice containers.

            “No,” she said.  “Pretty sure someone was watching, though, though I didn’t catch him.  Made me mad.”

            Rupert grunted.  Upstairs, a prolonged scraping noise was followed by a volley of what sounded like instructions from Buffy.

            “What’s going on up there?” Elisabeth said.

            “It occurred to both Buffy and me around lunchtime that if, as she said, any shit hit the fan, we could expect more impromptu guests.  Willow is working on protocols for cornerstone protection spells, and Buffy and Andrew are, more prosaically, clearing out the upstairs rooms so that we can move any necessaries over from both our flats.”

            “Good idea.  We’ll want the books over here ASAP, too, I guess.”

            “Yes,” he said, reaching for his wineglass.  “The shelves in the study are ready to receive them, I think?”

            “Pretty much.  We’ll need to wipe them down.  We can refinish the cases one by one, and move the relevant books to other parts of the house as needed.”

            Rupert nodded.

            “Speaking of bookcases—” Elisabeth held onto her wineglass with both hands— “I would like to see the priesthole now.”

            He stopped his motions at the range to look at her.  Then he put down his wine and reached to cover the pan of stir-fry with its lid.  “I think I left the torch in the study.”

            “I’m thinking,” Elisabeth said, leaving her wine on the counter to follow him, “that we’d probably better start keeping one in that room.”

            Rupert snorted, and smiled at her briefly over his shoulder.

            The torch was indeed there, standing upended on one of the shelves.  The cat uncurled itself from a perch on the mantelpiece and stretched, looking at them and yawning.  Rupert gave Elisabeth the torch and hauled back the bookcase door.  It was still a stiff and groaning door, but she could tell that he had put in some time doing what he could to get the hinges in order.

            He moved aside and let her go down first, with the torch.  The cat leaped down and darted ahead of her, becoming a shadow in the torchbeam as she moved it over her path.

            Down she went, with Rupert right behind her, slowly.  It was indeed very dark, which tightened the slack on her breathing; but the beams in the ceiling were sturdy, wood blackened with age like that in the attic, which she had taken as the image of a chapel in her mind.  This was a burrow, a chapel-echoing burrow.  Elisabeth played the beam over the space as she descended to the ground.  The floor was firm earth; an ancient carved bench occupied one curved earth wall.  The spacious room was otherwise empty.

            “Where is this passage you mentioned?”

            He brought his hand forward over her shoulder to gesture toward the wall at her right.  “It’s concealed in a curve of the room; what looks like a shadow from here is actually a turning.”  At first Elisabeth could not tell what he meant; then she came a few steps closer and saw.  “This goes out to the wood?”  She approached it close enough to shift the beam into the turning a little.

            “It doubles back a bit, first.  Presumably to stop pursuit from heading directly to the wood aboveground.”

            Elisabeth nodded.  “All these appear to be time-buying measures.”

            “Yes,” he said.

            “I wonder if they had them before.”

            The cat passed along her shins, and moved on to Rupert’s, startling her for a moment.  In her sudden movement, the torchbeam caressed his profile briefly.  “I am thinking,” Rupert said, “that they didn’t have the escape tunnel before.  My theory is that when they rebuilt this place they intended it to be a place for Watchers, not their ultimate stronghold, perhaps, but something that could be both defended and abandoned.  The work was going to be slow.  But then the last Bartholomae died, and the haunting set in; and the project was lost.”

            “Are there a lot of lost projects like that?”

            “More than there are found ones, I imagine.”

            A brief silence passed.  Elisabeth let the beam fall still toward the stairway and the distant light of the study above.  She watched the motes in the pale yellow light rise and settle.

            “Did you get much out of Andrew?” she asked him finally.

            “A good deal,” Rupert said.  “He is eager to cooperate.  I think you put the wind up him with that Palpatine crack.”

            Elisabeth snorted.  “I guess it can be a useful story to reference.”

            “Hah,” he said.  “When Robson approached _me_, I asked him whether we were in the story of the fatted calf or the story of the thirty silver pieces.”

            Elisabeth froze, while in the farther reaches of her mind bays and pathways unfolded, firm and navigable.  “We ask what story we are in,” she breathed.  “That’s it.  That’s where the coherence is.  Where’s my copy of Turner?  Did I leave it at the flat?”

            “Eh?”

            “That’s it!” she cried.  “We ask what story we are in.  We’re always asking.”

            She could tell that he was with her, though his face was deep in shadow.  “Are you saying,” he said in a longsuffering voice, “that Andrew is right?”

            “In a certain way, yes,” she answered at once.  “Here, take the torch.  I’ve got to find that book.”

            As he took the torch from her, their hands touched; and she caught the glint of his eyes in a smile.

 

*

 

Between unfolding her new ideas on mind theory and fairy tale, and eating furiously, Elisabeth’s dinner passed very quickly.  Everyone else was quite solicitous toward her: Andrew volunteered to do the washing-up, Rupert listened carefully to her frenetic bursts of speech, and Buffy undertook to make the phone calls necessary to ready them for their plans, once Dr. Kettering-Carter called back.

            She did so, quite on schedule, to say that she had fixed a meeting for them the day after next, in a well-known Oxford pub.  Robson had desired her to say that he was happy to make the concession of coming to Oxford for the meeting.  “Which means he’s _in_ Oxford already,” Elisabeth said tartly.  “Tell him thank you for his trouble.”

            “Certainly, if you desire it,” the doctor said.  Elisabeth had not been sure whether to expect hostility on her part, but the doctor showed no hostility, only a dry reluctance.  Grateful, Elisabeth had done her best to avoid insulting her friendship with Robson.  Too, Dr. Kettering-Carter had not been disingenuous:  nothing even remotely like “forces for good should work together” had passed her lips.  Elisabeth remembered their first meeting, when she treated Rupert in her flat; she had an air of deciding what was appropriate to do and then doing it without fuss.  Elisabeth didn’t trust her merely for this; but it took away some of the extra worries that this whole thing would be clouded by emotional manipulation.

            Elisabeth wrote down the information the doctor gave her, passed it on to Buffy, along with her thoughts about the physical arrangements, and left her to call Brian.  She went back to her laptop and her notebook.

            It was so easy that she found it a little scary.  The outline seemed to rewrite itself.  Her Mark Turner books _were_ at the flat, but she would retrieve them later.

            _One: Mind Theory and the Implications of Faerie.  Subheading: Metaphor.  Subheading:  Foundation stories.  Subheading:  Argument._

            Argument.  No doubt Robson had an argument, and a story, and surely had used metaphors that had appealed to Andrew Wells.

            _Two: Faerie and the Freedom of Significance.  Subheading: Meta-discussions of the Faerie writer; Dante (Italian), Goethe (German), Macdonald (English).  Subheading:  Modern meta-discussions; Tolkien, (bell hooks?) (Neil Gaiman?), Turner/Lakoff.  Subheading:  Meta-texts as the Golden Key._

            The Golden Key.  Elisabeth thought of the ending of that story, how it ended not with an arrival but a journey.  _I’m not looking for a place to stop_, she thought: _I’m looking for a place to start_.  And so was Rupert.  She felt reassured.

            _Three:  Texts and Their Foundational Stories.  Subheading:  The Quest Narrative.  Subheading:  The Restoration Narrative.  Subheading:  The Alienation Narrative.  Subheading:  Inward and outward transformation.  Subheading:  Re-exchange of meanings._

            The First had tried to invalidate her efforts by claiming real academics didn’t make scholarly hay out of their personal lives.  But they did: and they also made their personal lives from scholarly hay.  There was an exchange, a continual exchange between them of meanings; and that was how minds did their work of restoring the world.

            Elisabeth put down her pen and sat back to look at her work.  The fourth section would be about this work of restoration, but she wasn’t ready to pin it down yet.

            She shut up the house for the night and went to bed.  If there were watchers outside, they would see the lights going off one by one; but they wouldn’t see the work Willow was currently doing from an astral plane.  Elisabeth smiled to herself.

            In their bedroom, Rupert had dressed for bed and was under the covers with a book.  He smiled at her over his glass-rims, briefly.

            “Whatcha reading?”  She crossed to the closet and began to undress.

            “Stole your _Purgatory_,” he said.

            “Oh, you’re going straight to hell for that one!” she joked.

            He smiled; put down the book on his nightstand and followed it with his glasses.  By the time she had gotten into her pajamas and come to bed, he had turned out his lamp and slid down beneath the covers.

            She got into bed, thinking.  She thought about Rupert’s theory of the Bartholomaes’ plans for the house.  She thought about separations in the midst of journeys.  “Missing you one place, we meet another.”  She thought about cornerstones, and chapels, and the stories one believed one was in.

            “Goodnight, love,” Rupert said, and composed himself to sleep.

            “Mm,” she said, absently, and reached to turn off her light.

            She thought about the kiss he had given her after she braved the darkness.  She thought about Neruda and his wild hunger, and the way that Rupert had disengaged himself.  For a dizzying, frightening moment she wondered if perhaps he was leaving her.  Then she realized it was just the opposite.

            He was courting her.

            Whether he had articulated it to himself or not, that was what he was doing: laying his diffidence and his humility and his desire before her, and letting her choose.  _You have a nineteenth-century streak a mile wide_, she had once complained to him.  Then, she had not wanted his solicitude if it interfered with her own course of being and action.  Now…what had changed?  She had not ceased to value her independence, but still she found herself wanting to give him this.  She wanted to be courted: she wanted this _sub rosa_ dance.

            She fell asleep still trying to figure out what it meant.

 

*

 

Rupert had anticipated being anxious and envious of everyone else’s active roles; so he was glad when Buffy suggested they ready the house as a refuge—it gave him something to do.  And while he did feel a little twinge when he heard Buffy discussing plans for the next day with Brian on the phone, the rage and misery inexplicably refused to appear.  Unwilling to court it, he threw himself into the work of moving the occult library to Pyke’s Lea.

            Andrew was in charge of wiping down the bookshelves to receive the books and sorting Elisabeth’s notes on what should go where.  It was determined by them all, almost without saying, that the case that concealed the priesthole should carry books just like all the others, so Andrew was also set to finishing the work Rupert had started, oiling the hinges and sanding the edges to stop them scraping.

            Rupert bought a large number of cartons and set them up in Elisabeth’s flat.  With Buffy’s help he packed and loaded the books box by box.  They didn’t speak much; but several times he caught Buffy looking at him with an unreadable expression, as if she were sizing something up.

            This, oddly, did not worry him either.

            With the car, it took several trips between the flat and Oxford to move all the books.  At each arrival, they found Elisabeth staring at her laptop—a fruitful-looking stare this time—or dunking a teabag in hot water, or festooned with sticky-notes, skimming a book.  The first trip, Rupert brought her the books she had requested from the little shelf near her desk at the flat, and she had rewarded him with a smile he hadn’t seen in—how long?  Rupert couldn’t remember.

            He knew she must have seen the note he had written her, because the book he’d secreted it in was in heavy use—he could see it on the table, in premium position—but she had said nothing.  Rupert hoped that meant she understood what he was doing, that he had pulled back because it had become very important that he not make any mistakes.  He was waiting and observing, for the moment that would come—for surely it would come—the moment where he could act in a way that was both organic and perfectly calculated.  In the meantime, he would keep her informed, as it were.

            He was pretty sure she had not yet seen the note he had stuck to the back of her icon.

            They made the final trip in the late afternoon.  Elisabeth had left the table and was poking among the boxes they had already brought; she came to help them with the last ones.  Then she put on tea while Rupert sank into a chair at the kitchen table with a glass of water, sweating.

            “It never gets easier, moving books, does it?” she said as she put down his tea before him.

            Rupert shook his head.  “They get heavier.”

            “I wouldn’t be surprised if they carried extra spiritual weight everywhere they went,” Elisabeth went on cheerfully.  “Wonder if it’d be a good idea to cleanse them.”

            Rupert had often thought that he would like to cleanse the books of their time away from him, but had never found the opportunity.  “You’d help me with the spell?”

            “Yes.  I’m a little less afraid of doing magic now.”

            A little less afraid of doing magic with him.  She didn’t need to say it.  He said nothing.

            “We could clear the ground and start fresh,” Elisabeth said, pouring her own tea.  “Make it all shiny and new.”

            Her tone was light and playful, and he answered her in kind.  “‘Old men should be explorers,’” he said.

            She turned from doctoring her tea, and her eyes were warm.  “Have we lifted the embargo on Eliot, then?”

            He snorted comfortably.  She had not jumped to deny his reference to old men, he noticed: perhaps because she knew he did not feel old.  Neither did he feel young.  He raised his eyes to hers and waited.

            She came to him; laid a hand on his shoulder and bent to kiss his forehead.  When she straightened, he took her hand from his shoulder and kissed its fingertips softly, with his eyes meeting hers.

            Yes, she knew.  She smiled; and he released her to retrieve her tea and go away out to the dining table, to resume her work.

            Rupert did not feel young.  No: in his youth he would not have known how to appreciate this.

 

*

 

The meeting was to take place at half-past noon, in the Kings Arms.  Elisabeth fully expected that Robson would have his men in place: as she would have hers.

            Buffy and Brian were to be at the pub as nondescript sweethearts sharing a pub lunch.  Elisabeth was fairly sure that Robson had never seen Buffy in the flesh, but she was not as concerned about them being recognized as that they should have the chance to arrive and set up their camouflage unmolested.  So early in the morning, Buffy took a train to London; and Brian was to go and bring her back, as if they were tourists.  It was a ruse that could only be done once.

            Rupert and Andrew were to stay at Pyke’s Lea, shelving books and guarding the house.

            Willow had been put on the alert; she had instructed Elisabeth in the making of a magical panic button, and Elisabeth had tried out the spell first on her lucky sixpence.  If she found herself in danger, she would grip it in her fist, and Willow would get the message.  The sixpence felt warm in Elisabeth’s pocket, as did the cross under her shirt.

            When it came time for her to go, Rupert watched her pack her satchel with two books, a notebook, and a pen, then helped her on with her coat and wordlessly saw her out the door.  She drove to Oxford and parked at her flat, trying to control the tremors in her stomach, trying to ignore the second thoughts that shrilled in her mind.  What was she doing walking into town, on the same route they had kidnapped her from?  Would Buffy be at too much of a disadvantage in an unfamiliar London, and be intercepted?  Would she, Elisabeth, even be able to speak without stumbling and capitulating?

            It helped to walk; to eat up the ground with nervous strides, up and across the Bridge and into the city.  The weather had warmed a little, and Elisabeth had left her frock coat unbuttoned, the fringes of her red scarf tickling the air as she moved.

            Along the streets, where post-Christmas tourists wandered and pre-term students hurried, Elisabeth pursued her way.  She felt no eyes upon her, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t being watched.  She kept her stride firm, as whoever might be watching should see someone confident and calm, all the way to the door of the pub.

            She swept a quiet glance around the busy room, taking note of the people there.  She saw Robson at once, alone at a table, three-quarters finished with his lunch—early, the rat.  Unsurprising.  The grizzled man at the bar who cast his gaze quickly into his pint was surely Robson’s man; Elisabeth knew there must be others.

            Brian and Buffy were nowhere to be seen.

            Her heart beating hard in her chest, Elisabeth went up to order her lunch, something that would give her a few minutes’ wait while she figured out what to do.  If Brian and Buffy were MIA, should she abandon the plan and hit the panic button straight off?  Or should she plunge ahead without them?

            She decided, for the time being, to grit her teeth and go on; but she didn’t like being the only one who knew that they were missing.  Suppose she was being distracted while something unspeakable happened to them both?  It was a risk she’d have to take.

            Her plate was clapped down in front of her.  She retrieved it and her pint of cider, and turned, just as Buffy and Brian came in, and she almost ran into them.

            They weren’t looking at her; they were laughing into one another’s faces at some hugely amusing joke.  Buffy was wearing the soft wool hat Elisabeth had bought her after Christmas, the one with the jaunty little puffball on top.  Brian had his arm around her in a gesture that was as natural as any lovelorn male might use.  Elisabeth swerved around them, gritting her teeth in simultaneous relief and annoyance.

            Still annoyed, she plunked down her lunch plate across from Robson and plunked herself down after.  “You’re early, I see,” she said sourly.

            “Took me less time to arrive than I expected.”  He was quite cool, and did not startle at her abrupt manner.

            “I imagine not, since you’ve probably been in Oxford all along,” she retorted.  “Was it you shadowing me at Magdalen the other day?”

            Robson shook his head.  “My man Perkins had very little to report.”

            “Q.E.D.,” Elisabeth said, stabbing at her shepherd’s pie.

            “Where’s Giles today?” Robson asked, casually.  “Or are you still pretending that you’re not intimately associated with him?”

            Whether he had intended it or not, the swipe brought back Elisabeth’s physical memory not only of her ordeal before the Council, but of her own response to it.  She relaxed and raised her head to fix Robson with a calculating gaze.

            “_Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose_,” she said.  “Rupert is at home, doing other things.”

            Unexpectedly, Robson smiled.  It was a familiar smile, subtle and faint, the sort of smile Buffy would have accused Rupert of learning in class at the Watcher’s Academy.

            Elisabeth raised her cider to her lips and took a deep quaff.  In her peripheral vision, Buffy and Brian settled at a table with their drinks, sitting on the same side, cuddled into one another.  Elisabeth rolled her mind’s eye.  _There’s such a thing as overdoing it_, she thought.

            “So,” Robson said, “may I ask why you called this meeting?”

            The playing-dumb gambit.  Elisabeth cut more deeply into her shepherd’s pie and got to the point.  “Andrew Wells,” she said.

            “Ah,” Robson said, with a delicate sniff.  He pushed his empty plate aside and sat back with the remainder of his ale.  “I did wonder how long that avenue would be open.”

            Elisabeth bristled, took a breath, and calmed herself.  “You really ought to apologize to him,” she said.  “That was a very cruel thing you did to Andrew.”

            He raised an eyebrow.  “As opposed to being a cruel thing I did to Giles?  Enlighten me.”

            “Rupert can take care of himself.”  _He can take care of you too_, she thought, but held that in reserve.  “It was cruel to Andrew to use him like that—and I don’t doubt you know enough of his history to understand that, or else you wouldn’t have lit on him.”

            “I wouldn’t cast him as such a victim if I were you,” Robson said.  “That boy is dangerous.”

            Elisabeth resisted the impulse to look at Buffy, who, if she had heard that, would be sorely tempted to give a betraying snort.  Buffy knew the nature of the danger Andrew posed better than anyone, and if this was Robson’s effort to divide and conquer, he was playing with pretty feeble tools indeed.

            “He’s still a boy,” Elisabeth answered.

            “Well, there was a period of time during which we wondered if we had made a mistake taking him into our confidence.”  He looked perfectly serious.  Elisabeth raised a skeptical eyebrow.

            “We introduced him to Roger Wyndam-Pryce,” Robson said, as if this meant something.

            “Oh is _he_ still alive?” Elisabeth couldn’t stop the faint curl of lip at the mention of Wesley Wyndam-Pryce’s father, whom she had encountered briefly during her interrogation.

            “He wouldn’t be, if his son had had his way.”

            Clearly Robson was sitting on a piece of information that Elisabeth didn’t have.  She wasn’t about to ask for it, but the mention of Wesley opened a new line of thought to her.  She scraped up a bite of meat and gravy, and chewed thoughtfully.

            “So,” she said, “I take it you’re triangulating on Angel.”

            “We’re not the only ones.”  Seeing that she was not about to ask, he hesitated and said, “Someone sent a robotic duplicate of Roger to infiltrate Angel’s office and hamstring him.  It wasn’t us.”

            “Obviously, or you would have just sent Roger,” Elisabeth said.  “And…and you think _Andrew_ built the robot?”  She laughed.

            “We ruled it out eventually,” Robson said coldly.  “We knew he had been friends with a robotics expert, and he had had some contact with us, enough to pick up information about Wesley’s family.”

            “Well,” Elisabeth said, “then I guess the cuckoo’s in _your_ nest, and not in ours.”  She blinked.  “So, then Wesley killed the robot that looked like his father?  Good for him.”

            “It is _not_ good.  It’s a disaster.  Roger hit the ceiling when he found out, and has been very touchy toward Wesley, and Wesley (quite understandably) won’t give him information or speak to any other Council members—or purported Council members—and we haven’t got any other ways inside the vampire’s circle.”

            “And you think we do?”

            “Well,” he said, “there’s Miss Summers.”

            “Well, see, that’s the thing,” Elisabeth said.  “Even assuming there’s an open line between Buffy and Angel, to get a bead on him you’d have to control Buffy, and you haven’t got a snowball’s of doing that, so what are you snooping on us for?”

            “We have to make up our deficits somehow,” Robson said, his voice hard.

            “Is this where the speech about the Balkanization of forces for good comes in?” Elisabeth said, unmoved.

            “No,” he said.  “It’s a bit late to lament that.  Though Giles did a nice line in idealism for a long while.  It’s interesting, you know, that they would choose you to be the voice for this.”

            Elisabeth had relaxed, but she was still keenly aware of the table, of their feet under it, of each new person who walked in; and so she had less energy for pique when she asked, “And who is ‘they’?”

            “Well, Miss Summers and Giles, of course.  They’re remarkably close, which I suppose is how Slayers and Watchers should be.  That was how it used to be, of course.”  His smile took on a hint of the sardonic, and Elisabeth rolled her eyes, simultaneously annoyed and alarmed.

            “It’s kind of a waste of time to try and bait her, you know,” she said.

            She waited to see if Robson would do or say anything further to blow Buffy’s cover, but he merely gave Elisabeth a tepid smile.

            Elisabeth cast her thoughts back along the conversation, and frowned.  “Why would Roger hit the ceiling when he found out Wesley killed his avatar?  One would think he’d be pleased his son showed some cojones.”

            “He might,” Robson said, “if Wesley hadn’t emptied the clip.”

            “Ah,” Elisabeth said.  “And you found this out how?”

            Robson sighed.  “I think Wesley has finally figured out he can’t confide in his mother and expect her to keep his secrets.”

            Elisabeth thought of Charles Bowen as she said, “You realize that that relationship rather images forth why Rupert won’t help you, I think.”

            “And can you say that you haven’t got your own sore places?”

            “I’ve got no need to say it,” Elisabeth said.  “Abuse with impunity?  Who’d want to hook up with that?  Especially after you put a contract out on the two Slayers who wound up defeating the First Evil.  I guess you’d try your feeble best to protect a Potential, but once they get called, they’re supposed to die like good little girls.”

            He went very pale, and his hand clenched on the table.  Elisabeth felt all the satisfaction of mutual fury: she was damned if he was going to pump her full of extraneous information and have her killed on her way home, without her getting at least one shot in.

            “You have no right—” he said softly—

            “—to mock your grief?  I beg your pardon, but let me recall your attention to the original topic of this meeting, which is what you did to Andrew.”

            He watched her mutinously, his lips a thin line.

            “Talk about mocking grief.  You held out your heritage as a false temptation of redemption for him, and you want to tell me that I’m treading on its dignity?”

            “I would have honored my promises,” Robson said, even more softly.

            “Which makes me wonder,” Elisabeth replied, “why they’ve sent _you_.”

            He said nothing.

            “Why have they sent you to cover this beat?  They know you’ve sympathized with Rupert in the past.  They know Rupert saved your life from those Bringers.  They know there was a relationship there once.  What makes them so sure you won’t ‘go native’?”

            Robson was still pale, but he had straightened in his chair and fixed Elisabeth with the ghost of his Watcher’s smile.

            “I’ll tell you why,” Elisabeth said.  “It’s because they need you.  Without honorable men among them, the Council can’t exist.”

            Robson’s smile rose thinly.  “I had forgotten your talent for speechmaking.”

            “Speechmaking saved my hide two years ago,” Elisabeth said.

            “Along with the Council’s honor, about which you are so manifestly skeptical,” he returned.

            “Then prove me wrong.”  Elisabeth pushed away her plate and sat back.

            “What do you want?”

            “Xander Harris.  I want your surveillance taken off him.”

            Robson shook his head.  “We need that information.”

            “Not at his expense you don’t.”

            “Where there are Slayers,” Robson warned her, “there will be Watchers.”

            “Which would be all to the good,” Elisabeth said austerely, “provided they aren’t under too deep cover to help, or gone rogue, or too much like Roger Wyndam-Pryce.  You’ve got plenty of information to keep you occupied ferreting it out.  Leave Xander alone.”

            “You can’t enforce it,” Robson observed.

            “But we could try, and you’d be forced to devote your resources to defending yourselves.  And in the meantime, that ticking time-bomb over at Wolfram &amp; Hart will tick unattended.”

            “You could share your information.”

            “If we had any.”

            He studied her face carefully, and she sat patient.

            “And if you came into possession of information?” he said finally.  “What then?”

            “Depends on the information,” Elisabeth said stolidly.

            “So,” he said, “what you’re proposing is a full détente.”

            “Unequivocal and unmitigated.”

            “You’re not afraid I’d merely pay mouth-honor to the obligation and carry on as before?”

            “Afraid?  After the First,” Elisabeth said, “I’ve found fear to be an extremely relative term.”

 

*

 

“If I’m to convince my colleagues to pull our man off Mr. Harris—”

            “And anybody else you’ve got them on—”

            “—I’ll need to bring a token of good faith from you.”

            “Your own assurance ought to be sufficient,” Elisabeth said.

            Robson merely waited.

            “A token,” Elisabeth sighed.  “Very well.”  She reached into her pocket and pulled out her lucky sixpence between two fingers.  She held it up before Robson’s eyes, and he broke into a short laugh.

            “This is my lucky sixpence,” Elisabeth said, with a faint smile to match his own.  “I wouldn’t give it to just anybody.”  She held it to the center of the table, and he reached out his own fingers to take it; but they stopped just short of the exchange, and their eyes met.

            “It’s a double-edged sword,” she told him.  “Be careful how you use it.  If you stab me in the back, you might not find it so lucky anymore.”  She considered telling him how to use it, but just as quickly dismissed the idea: if he was in good faith, he’d figure it out, and if he wasn’t, the act of throwing it away would tell Willow something.  “If you’re on the up-and-up, it’ll help you.”

            He nodded and reached for it, but she held it away one moment more.  “Do you have a first name, Mr. Robson?”

            His eyes were a weathered blue, and calmly direct.  “Michael,” he said.

            She smiled.  “I’ll think of you on Michaelmas,” she said, and gave him the sixpence.  He took it gingerly and tucked it away in a pocket of his jacket.

            “Three days enough time to show me results?” Elisabeth asked.

            “Quite,” he said.

            “Excellent.”  She rose, brushing at a spot of gravy on her red scarf, and shrugged her coat higher on her shoulders.  Now that the thing was done, she wanted to be up and out of there, never mind being the first to leave: she felt as if propelled by a whirlwind.

            “A good remainder of the holiday to you,” Robson said mildly.

            “And to you,” she said, and swept out without a backward glance.

 

*

 

Still caught up in manic energy, Elisabeth walked briskly back over the Bridge and to the car.  She had flashing mental images of car bombs going off, of goons following her and running her off the road, but she ignored them.  At this point the only thing to do was to press on, whether the disaster hit or not.

            The car did not blow up when she turned the ignition.  She pulled out of the parking space and made her turns for home with deliberate movements, unhurrying, with the same great energy.

            The images did not stop: the old horror of Pyke’s Lea burning caught at her mind, but she drove on without panic.  She searched the horizon for the telltale spiral of black smoke, but there was none.

            The lane.  Her hands were preternaturally steady on the wheel.  The house came into view: perfectly normal.  Elisabeth parked and set the handbrake; the front door opened, and Rupert became visible in the shadows beyond the threshold.

            Still without hurry, she strode up the walk and up the front steps.  At the threshold she stopped to look up at him.  Rupert’s face was impassive, but his stance was a foursquare question: she stepped across the threshold, answering it, and he caught her up in his arms, lifting her off her feet, and she flung her arms hard around him, and he kissed her.

            His mouth against hers was ardent, his kiss radiant with the taste of heat: and she had an answer for that, too.  She felt as if she had never properly kissed him before.  She gave his mouth her full attention for a long minute, and he held her close.

            Presently he let her feet touch the ground, and they ended the kiss; and then the shaking hit her, and she clung to him to keep from sinking.  He bore her up as she shivered, and she buried her face in the front of his jumper.  “It’s all right,” he murmured, raising one hand to stroke back her hair.  “It’s all right.”  He kissed her forehead; she drew a long trembling breath, and the wave of sickness passed.

            “Come into the kitchen,” Rupert said.  “I will make tea, and you will tell me the story.”  He reached past them to shut the door, casting a small smile outside at whatever might be out there; then led her down the hall and pulled out the kitchen chair for her to sit in.  She dropped unceremoniously into it, shrugged out of her coat so that it hung over the back, and unwound her scarf to hang over the exposed lining of the coat behind her.  But she was still shivering.  Rupert, who failed to notice nothing, paused in getting out cups to stoke the fire.

            “Andrew!” he called.  “Come and have tea.”

            Elisabeth heard him come at once, footsteps tracking from the study: Andrew’s eyes were a little pink, she noticed as he entered, but he was carrying himself with a new, if fragile, dignity.  He sat down at the table across from her and stared quietly at his hands.

            Rupert put her tea down in front of her, and Andrew’s in front of him; then he sat comfortably down with his own.  “Now, then,” he said quietly.  “Tell us what happened, Elisabeth.”

            “You’re going to—you’re going to tell me too?” Andrew looked up from his hands and stared from Rupert to Elisabeth and back.

            Elisabeth nodded calmly, and Rupert said:  “I think you have a right to know.”

            Elisabeth nodded again, agreeing; Andrew looked as though he would rather not.  But he took a manful sip of his tea and gave them both a nod.

            She sipped her tea, cleared her throat, and began.

 

*

 

As she was finishing, Buffy and Brian arrived, tumbling into the house as manically as Elisabeth had done.  She looked at their faces fearfully, and was reassured when Buffy smiled.  “It’s all right,” she said.  “Did you tell Giles what went down?”

            “Yeah,” Elisabeth said, clearing her throat again, “I was just finishing.”

            “What was that you gave him at the end?  I couldn’t see it.”

            “I gave him my lucky sixpence.”

            “What?” Rupert said indignantly.

            “I made my lucky sixpence into a beacon, per Willow’s instructions,” Elisabeth explained, “and I gave it to him as a token of my good faith.”

            Brian helped himself to the tea in the pot and put his backside against the counter.

            “You gave him your panic button?”  Buffy stared at her.

            “I had two of them,” Elisabeth said, lifting the chain of her cross up from under the placket of her shirt.  “Anyway, I told him it was a double-edged sword—a guaranteed link with us, but pleasant or not depending on how he acts.”

            Rupert snorted.

            “What happened after I left?” Elisabeth asked.

            “Well, we waited.  I thought maybe they’d picked up on us being there, so we hung out for a little bit.  Robson left soon after you did.”

            “We spotted a guy at the bar that was probably one of theirs,” Brian added, “but he didn’t do anything and he didn’t move, so we left.”

            “Anybody follow you?”

            “Didn’t see ’em if they did,” Brian said.  “But from what you say, they know where you live anyway, so likely they wouldn’t need to.”

            “Well,” Buffy said, “we’ll just keep our eyes peeled.  Whatever happens, at least we made our position clear.”  She looked directly at Elisabeth.  “Thanks.”

            Elisabeth let out a shaky sigh.  “I’m not sure cloak-and-dagger diplomacy is my _métier_.”

            Rupert lifted his teacup with a smile in his eyes.  “Don’t underestimate yourself,” he said.

            Elisabeth could only sigh again in reply.  “Well,” she said, after a moment, “if you, Andrew, will show Brian where he’s staying tonight, I’m going to do a little shelving in my office while Rupert makes his report.”  Rupert had been the one deputed to report to Willow when the plan was complete.

            Elisabeth rose wearily to her feet and pulled her coat and scarf off the back of the chair.

            “Gimme your coat,” Buffy said suddenly.  “I’ll hang it up.  Then I’ll come and help you.”

            After a startled pause, Elisabeth handed over the coat, and the two women shared a dry smile as the tea party broke up.

 

*

 

“I’ve got Watcher-man covered.  Don’t worry about it any more, Giles.  Xander is as safe as we can make him.”

            “I don’t like to think of him—”  Rupert broke off.

            “He knows just as much as you did when you were Young Mr. Globetrotter, I bet.”  Willow had the uncanny ability to sound like she was reading his mind, even when she wasn’t, and he had not forgotten what it felt like when she did, so he had only his own transparency to blame.

            “Hence my worry.  And what about Angel?” he said, though it was more than useless to bring that up.

            He could almost hear Willow’s shrug.  “You’ll have to ask Buffy about that.  She insisted on being in charge of keeping an eye on him.  I’m not touching that one.”

            “No,” he agreed.  It would continue to cost him, but he had to let Buffy make her own mind up on Angel.  Putting his oar in—even brandishing his oar—even making a small gesture toward his oar—would be disastrous.

            “Thanks,” Rupert said, vaguely.

            “No problem.  I’ll get back to my work—”

            “On the beach?” Rupert said innocently.

            “Hey, now.  Dipping into the astral plane is hard work.”

            “I know it is,” he said, sobering.

            “I need to get a bead on Elisabeth’s sixpence beacon.  Now that I know Robson has it, I should be able to set up a link in case he ever uses it.”

            “Yes.  And thank you,” he added, “for securing the house.”

            “Wasn’t hard,” Willow said.  “The house is pretty friendly since you cleansed it.”

            “Good to hear,” Rupert said.

 

*

 

Buffy hung up Elisabeth’s coat and scarf, then shrugged out of her own jacket and pulled off her hat; her hair crackled, flyaway with static, and she wiped it away from her face as best she could.

            She felt simultaneously euphoric and grim.  It had always been going to come to this, ever since they walked away from the crater that was Sunnydale and chose to take refuge with neither Angel nor the remnants of the Council.  Since Willow hacked into the Council’s databases and plundered their accounts and contact protocols.  Since they had fanned out over the globe and undertaken the mammoth task of finding Slayers all by themselves.

            In a way it was a good thing that the Council was regrouping, because it introduced a third player into the duality of their conclave vs. Wolfram &amp; Hart.  Buffy sighed to herself.  She had not wanted to admit to herself that she was set against Angel as firmly as she was set against the Council, but Robson’s revelations had made that all too clear.  Whatever Angel was up to, he was on his own.  Likewise, Angel’s actions gave the Council something to occupy themselves with—and historically, they would admit no difference between Angel and Angelus—besides the upstarts that had infected the world with too many Slayers.

            Elisabeth had articulated it well: the task at hand was to maintain this uneasy and separate balance.  If the shit hit the fan for any of them, they would go back to duality, to a dangerous pendulum.  Buffy thought back to the Knights of Ni or whatever they were, who had tried to kill Dawn.  The Council did indeed need someone like Robson, to keep them from degenerating into fanatics.  And she, Buffy, needed someone like Elisabeth, to say these things, to give words to the actions she was going to take.

            Buffy had a suspicion, however, that Elisabeth would still like nothing more than to come off the bench on the rarest of occasions, and leave the rest to Giles.  Well, for the time being Buffy could accommodate that.  If Robson kept his word.  If Giles had gotten over his crisis.

            She climbed the stairs slowly and made for the corner room where Elisabeth was seated on the floor, sorting books out of a box.

            “Rupert was very kind,” she said, “to box up the rest of my academic books and bring them for me.”

            “Doesn’t look like you have enough for the shelves on this wall,” Buffy said.

            “Oh, that’ll change,” Elisabeth said, with a self-deprecating snort.

            Buffy smiled.  “Yeah, before you know it this house will be full of smelly knowledge.”

            Elisabeth laughed.  “The way it was meant to be,” she said.

            In the next room over, Brian and Andrew were setting up a second air bed and discussing cricket.  Buffy could hear them over the inflator fan.  Buffy and Andrew had moved his bed to one of the rooms they’d cleared, a few days ago, leaving Elisabeth her office to set to rights when she got the chance.

            On the empty desk lay the brown-paper-wrapped parcel that Elisabeth had retrieved from her sock drawer at Christmas.  Buffy went over to it and gently lifted an edge of the paper.

            “That’s my birthday present from Anne,” Elisabeth said, looking up from the book she was holding.  “Want to help me hang it up?”

            Buffy cleared the paper from the top surface and looked.  She knew it was an icon, but she was not totally sure who the two women with haloes were.  They looked happy, though they had not been drawn with smiles—it was something in the curve of their arms held out and the brightness of their eyes.  Buffy took it up from its paper nest and looked closer.  It was not a photograph shellacked onto wood; it was actually carved and painted there.  “Did she _make_ this?” Buffy asked.

            “Yeah.”  Elisabeth had got up to dig in a small carton of assorted picture-hanging stuff.  “She started work on it while I was at her house recovering, in the spring.  Oh, that reminds me.”  She turned around briefly.  “I should ask Rupert if he would call her after he’s done talking to Willow.  I mean, she’s probably safe where she is, but we ought to check in with her.”

            Buffy grunted in agreement and turned the icon over to look for a picture-hanging hole on the back.  There was one, but there was also a note, written on a sheet from a small notepad and taped to the smooth wood.  Buffy would recognize Giles’s small, cramped handwriting anywhere.  She read it before she could even think what it was doing there.

 

_Arise, make haste, my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come._

_For winter is now past, the rain is over and gone._

_The flowers have appeared in our land, the time of pruning is come: the voice of the turtle is heard in our land:_

_The fig tree hath put forth her green figs: the vines in flower yield their sweet smell. Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come:_

_My dove in the clefts of the rock, in the hollow places of the wall, shew me thy face, let thy voice sound in my ears: for thy voice is sweet, and thy face comely_.

 

Buffy blushed hot, just as Elisabeth turned round with a nail and hook cupped in her hand.  “Um,” she said, holding the icon out with its back facing Elisabeth, “I think this is supposed to be for you.”  She turned away and made a studied search for the hammer as Elisabeth took the icon and silently read the note.  When she found it, she peeked around: Elisabeth was still looking at the note, and there was a heavy shine in her eyes.  As Buffy watched, she blinked it away and peeled the note gently away from the icon’s back, to fold and tuck into her pocket.

            “Where are you going to hang it?”

            Elisabeth gestured at the west wall, facing the window.  “Here, I think,” she said.

            Together they measured the icon against the placing of the nail; Buffy drove it in (gently: preternatural accuracy wouldn’t stop her from bringing down all the plaster on the wall if she hit too hard), and they fitted the flat wood back flush with the wall.  Elisabeth stepped back, nearly tripping over the box of books, to judge whether it was straight.  They made a few adjustments and admired their handiwork: and the icon did look perfect, as if it had grown in its place.

            But after a moment Elisabeth sighed restively and said, “I’m going to go find Rupert and ask him about calling Anne.”

            Buffy nodded.  Elisabeth picked her way around piles of books and went.  In the doorway she turned briefly.  “Thanks for your help.”

            “You’re welcome,” Buffy said.

            She was gone.  Buffy shuffled around a stray book and sat down in the wooden swivel chair by the desk.  The empty room around her was quiet in its slant of late afternoon light, and the icon presided over the silence like a guardian.  This was a good place to think.

            Which was good, because Buffy had a lot to think about.

 

*

 

Brian and Andrew had already gone downstairs; Elisabeth could hear them in the kitchen, opening and shutting the refrigerator door and getting crockery out of the cabinets—Andrew had volunteered to cook dinner, and Brian, whose paternal instincts seemed to have been awakened, was helping him.

            She bypassed the kitchen and went to the study.  Rupert was there, of course, sitting on the edge of his desk, the toes of his boots planted just short of the squares of sunlight that lay across the carpet from the French doors.  He looked up mildly when she entered, and when she came close he scooted down the edge of the desk to make room for her.  She wasn’t tall enough to both sit and stretch her legs as he was doing, so she perched on the desk with one toe on the carpet for balance.

            “All right?” he asked.

            “Yes.  You?”

            “Yes.”

            “Where’s Buffy?”

            “I left her upstairs.  We hung my icon in the office.”

            “Ah,” he said, and went quiet.  Her face warm, Elisabeth dared a glance up at him; his eyes were cast down, lashes low, and his lips held a small, thoughtful smile.

            For a long moment there was no need to talk.  They watched the sunlight bars lengthen on the carpet.

            “I wish you could have met my parents,” Rupert said, as if they had been discussing it.  “I think they would have liked you.”

            “I wish I could have met them, too,” Elisabeth said softly.

            Rupert raised his gaze to the decorated ceiling.  “He was a great Watcher, my father, in his quiet way.  He loved books.  Not every Watcher does, you know.  He didn’t travel as much as I did when I was training, but he knew more about every place I’ve been than I ever will.”  He sighed.  “I miss him.”

            “How long has he been gone?”

            Rupert twisted his mouth, counting.  “I was about your age when he died.  So, close to twenty years.”

            “Was it…a natural death?”

            “More or less,” Rupert said.  “He was wounded fighting a colony of Svarak—swamp demons—that summer, and was carried off by pneumonia the winter after that.  My mother had died a few years before, and he missed her.”

            “Those books you’ve got in Bath—those were his?”

            He looked over at her.  “Yes.  Some very nice items.  Would you like to have them here?”

            “If you’re not concerned about putting all our books in one basket,” Elisabeth said with a smile.

            “It’s been a hazard with this house before,” he agreed.  “And so much was lost when the Council library was blown up.  But I can’t help thinking there’s a reason why human beings want books to live in company with one another.”

            Elisabeth nodded, and another small silence fell.

            At length Rupert spoke again.  “Shame you had to give away your lucky sixpence.”  Was he thinking of a rainy day, months ago, when she had offered it to him?

            “I’ve still got the cross,” Elisabeth said.

            Rupert smiled.  “Yes,” he said, “we’ve still got that.”

 

*

 

“Hello?”

            “Hello…Anne?”  He had not dared to address her simply by her name before.

            “Yes.”

            “Rupert Giles here….I—”

            “Oh, I was hoping you’d call.  How did—”

            “Are you all right?” he asked, alarmed.

            “Oh, yes, quite all right,” Anne said.  And though that was exactly what she would say even if she were not, Rupert had never heard her voice so unstrained before, so he relaxed in spite of himself.

            “How did the plan go?” Anne asked him.

            “I have good hopes for it,” Rupert said guardedly.  “Elisabeth brought off her part gracefully and well; we must wait and see what the outcome is.”

            “And you?” Anne asked, more quietly.  “How are you?”

            “I’m quite all right.”  He echoed her words, and realized that he was, in fact, speaking the truth.

            “Good,” she said.  “I’m glad to hear it.”

            He caught the softness in her tone and said, “Thank you.”

            “You’ll keep me abreast of the developments?”

            “Of course.”

            “Thank you,” she said; and he breathed out the last of his fear.

 

*

 

One of the interesting effects of being in a state of courtship, Elisabeth reflected that night as she got into bed, was the heightened desire for physical contact with the beloved.  The afternoon had waked her in a way she had not felt in a long time: that moment on the threshold, and the note Rupert had left on the icon, had together compounded hunger and emotion to a degree she had not anticipated.  And since they had tacitly initiated a period of separation, Elisabeth found that her only recourse was to return the energy within herself, to re-fuse it with her own vital force.  Perhaps he was having a similar experience, but if so, he gave no indication of it: he had gone to bed ahead of her, kissing her temple lightly before he went, and was now peacefully sleeping on his side of the bed.

            As if this weren’t upheaval enough, her nerves had gone back on her from the confrontation with Robson; she had picked at her dinner, and had had to reassure Andrew that there was nothing the matter with his cooking, and then fled to the refuge of the bathroom for a long soak in the tub.  The only thing to do, of course, was to wait it out and hope that it wouldn’t interfere with her sleep.

            Since Rupert had called Anne according to Elisabeth’s wishes, and Anne had assured them that she had not seen anything unusual or been interfered with in any way, Elisabeth decided to go to church the next day instead of holing up in Pyke’s Lea for some unspecified disaster.  She had played a round of cards with the others, then left them to their own devices while she went up to the office and amused herself with arranging her laptop and notes on the desk.

            Elisabeth straightened the covers over her lap, scrunched down among the pillows, and turned out her light.  As the darkness settled over them, she listened to the sounds of the others getting ready for bed, and waited for Rupert’s warmth to reach her and mingle with her own.

 

*

 

“You’re laughing at my pajamas, aren’t you.”

            Buffy stopped fighting the smile.  Brian came fully into the kitchen and pulled out a glass and the jug of milk, then hooked one of the chairs out from the table with a slippered foot and plunked himself down.

            “Where do you find pajamas with trains on them in your size?” Buffy asked him.  He was as tall as Giles: the thick navy robe he wore over his pajamas merely emphasized his lankiness.

            Brian shrugged and poured himself a full glass of milk.  “It’s not so very hard,” he said.  “You, I observe, are not dressed for eyelid inspection.”

            “No.  I did a quick patrol, but I still can’t sleep.”

            “Standing watch?” he said, though it wasn’t really a question.

            “Yeah; I guess so.”

            “Probably a good idea.”  Brian took a swig of milk and wiped the milk-mustache off his lips.

            “Giles and Elisabeth can take care of themselves, but I dunno.  I’m just used to the keeping-watch gig, I guess.”

            “Yeah,” Brian said.  “When are you going back?”

            “Well, it depends on what happens tomorrow and the next day.  My flight out’s on Tuesday, the sixth.”

            He nodded and sipped again.

            She looked directly at him.  “It makes me feel better that they’ve got you,” she said.

            Brian looked for a minute as if he might wave away her implied thanks, but he thought better of it and said, “I’ll be here.”

            “Thanks,” Buffy said.

            Brian downed half of his remaining milk and put down the glass to stifle a yawn.  “I’m not as young as I used to be,” he said.  “I think I’m going to go to bed.”  He lifted his glass and finished off the milk, then rose to put away the jug and rinse his glass in the sink.  “You going to stay up?”

            “I think so,” Buffy said.

            “Right.  Call if you need anything.”

            “Okay.”  He was nearly at the door when she said, “Brian?”

            He turned and waited.

            “Thanks for…you know, all the fun.  And stuff.”  God, that sounded ridiculous; but Brian didn’t seem to mind.

            “A little fun between friends,” he said with a quiet smile, “is never a bad thing.  Good night.”

            “Night.”

 

*

 

The sky clouded heavily over, and it rained hard.  Elisabeth darted through the downpour to the car and drove to church with windshield wipers flapping.

            Before that, Buffy went to bed in the grey predawn, met on the way up the stairs by Rupert coming down to make early morning coffee.  “All right?” he murmured.  “Yep,” she said.  “Get some rest then,” he said.  So she did, and the cat slept with her in a round curl on the bed, his tail nested around his nose.

            Elisabeth returned from church without mishap, except for being quite damp and cold; Anne, she reported, was fine.  She sat down at the kitchen table with her sock feet pointed in the direction of the fire, and read the beginnings of her new outline to Brian.  Drops from the downpour rolled down the lower half of the diamond-paned windows; Rupert and Andrew played chess, Rupert with a cup of coffee steaming at his elbow.

            They were waiting.

            Just as Rupert was clearing the kitchen table to make dinner, Buffy came downstairs with her cell-phone in one hand.

            “Just talked to Willow,” she announced quietly.  “She’s been on the phone with Xander.  He’s been working on tracing the guy the Council put on him, and finally found where he was staying, only to find out that he pulled up stakes a few hours before and left.  So Xander’s gonna stay put for a few days and then move on.”

            There was a brief silence; then Rupert said, “Well.  That’s a good start.”

            “Yeah,” Buffy said.  “I’m thinking we’ll keep a close eye on the sitch to see if it keeps steady that way.  In the meantime I’m asking everyone to check in in the next 24 hours with a report on their own security.”

            “Good idea,” Rupert said.

            “D’you want us to check in too?” Brian asked, grinning.

            “Idiot,” Elisabeth said affectionately.

 

*

 

Brian went home that evening, but promised to lend a hand the next day getting Andrew established in the Oxford flat, which was now very disheveled indeed.  Rupert intended to spend as much time with him, there and at home, as possible.

            Andrew, for his part, was looking steadier and less like a man in a small boat rocked by huge waves of shame.  He bore with equanimity the matter-of-fact ways that Rupert and Elisabeth discussed keeping him within ken.  “And we’ll have to face it, Elisabeth,” Rupert said:  “we’re going to have to get you your own car.”

            Elisabeth made a face.

            “Just don’t get her another Brave Little Toaster, Giles,” Buffy said.  “She needs a real car.”

            “There was nothing at all wrong with my Citroen,” Rupert said, glaring at her.  “It served me just fine until—”

            “—until Spike wrecked it,” Buffy said calmly.  “Yes, I know.”

            Elisabeth waited for the mushroom cloud, but none came: Rupert merely grunted, not without humor, and returned to sauteing onions.

            Buffy turned to Elisabeth and gave her an almost-smile worthy of Rupert himself.

 

*

 

The rain fell late into the night, and then cleared away, leaving a blustery sunny day the next morning.  Elisabeth sat down with her notes and books and laptop in her office, with the eastern sun streaming in along the floor toward the icon on the wall.

            Buffy and Giles took Andrew to Oxford and saw him settled in Elisabeth’s flat, then grabbed some hamburgers for lunch and came back.  But Buffy didn’t feel like packing for home yet.

            “Let’s go for a walk,” she suggested, and Giles agreed.

 

*

 

_Four:  Faerie and the Perpetual Invitation.  Subheading:  Repentance_.

            Buffy and Rupert had gone out walking.  Elisabeth was alone with her house; unless you counted the cat, who was in the room with her, stretched out in the sun and bathing himself.  The wind blew a hard gust, rattling the panes of the window: a friendly noise, as you chose to take it.

            This thesis was actually going to happen.  For the first time Elisabeth could see it, could see herself completing it and presenting its component parts as lectures, as Dr. Biggs had suggested long ago that she do.  All it would take was the push of sustained work.  All she had to lose was her fear.

            Elisabeth put her hands to the keyboard, caught up in thought.

 

*

 

Buffy and Giles sat on the stone wall dividing two pastures.  Overhead the soft clouds scudded, driven on by a relentless wind, leaving them shadowed and sunlit by turns.  Giles’s hands were quiet in his lap, and his eyes were on the western horizon.

            “It isn’t going to last forever,” Buffy said at last.

            He knew she was talking about the Council.  “No,” he agreed.  “The balance will shift again, sooner or later.”

            She said, “What are we going to do about Angel?”  It sounded horribly blunt, but she didn’t know how else to say it.

            Giles didn’t answer for a moment.  Then he asked:  “Do you trust him?”

            “No,” Buffy admitted.

            She waited, but Giles did not exult in her choice of him over Angel, nor did he ask if she trusted _him_.  Maybe he was afraid.  Maybe he already knew.  After all, he had allowed her finally to see how close he had come to breaking.  It was a bold move for him to make, who knew that she had distrusted him in the past.  Even in his wounded anger, he had given her this.  Buffy’s throat ached hard.

            He looked over at her, saw what was on her face, and gave her that little affectionate smile he always gave her when he was waiting for her own courage to catch up with her.  “I imagine we’ll deal with it as it comes.  Are you worried?” he said.

            “No,” Buffy said.

 

*

 

_Subheading: Re-vision_.

            Depending on the fairy tale, sometimes one returned to the old world with a new way of seeing things that jarred with the comfortable vision of the natives.  Just as often, though, the hero or heroine continued in the brave new world they had tumbled into, with only what they learned to guide them.  Either way (Elisabeth scrawled in her notebook), the interactions of the person with their surroundings were contingent on a re-vision of what had gone before.

            Elisabeth put down her pen; looked over at the icon.  “Yes, yes, all right,” she murmured to herself.  “You don’t have to rub it in.”

 

*

 

“You know,” she said, “Robson accused us of being close.”

            Giles’s lips twitched, either from annoyance or amusement.  “And _that_ worries you?”

            “Well, no.  Except…except it sounded like an innuendo, the way he said it.”

            It _was_ an amused smirk playing with Giles’s mouth.  He continued to stare away at the horizon.  That did it.

            “And you know what Xander told Elisabeth?  He said that sometimes when he reads our emails he wishes we would just fuck already.”  There.  That ought to shake him.

            But Giles remained unshaken.  He didn’t even raise an eyebrow.

            “That was supposed to be shocking,” Buffy said.  “There was supposed to be shock.”

            Far from being shocked, Giles was blinking thoughtfully into the far distance.  “Speaking hypothetically, I dare say it would offer some short-term relief, but probably would only introduce more problems in the long run.”

            “You’ve _thought about it_?” Buffy’s voice shot up half an octave.

            “Buffy—” he cast a longsuffering frown over at her— “were you paying attention at all when you pilfered the Watchers’ diaries for juicy tidbits about Angel?”

            She stared at him a moment, then, “I didn’t see anything in there about _that_,” she accused.

            “Well, I suppose not,” Giles said.  “Recent history has tended toward the prim and prudish.  Nineteenth-century notions of greensickness and all that.”

            “What the hell is _greensickness_?” Buffy demanded.

            “Not something you need to worry about,” Giles said, very dryly, which incensed her even further.  “My point is,” Giles went on (he was getting his lecture-voice on, and maybe there _was_ something to that love-hate theory), “we live in a relatively liberated age and country, where a man and a young girl working closely together are merely subjected to irritating innuendo and mild threats.  Not every society is like that.  Historically, a good number of Watcher-Slayer relationships were conducted under the aegis of marriages of convenience, to protect the girl from humans while she killed demons.  And—though the diaries _are_ somewhat reticent on the point—I imagine that more often than not, the marriages were consummated.”

            “That’s—”  _Disgusting_, she had been going to say, but she choked on the word.  She swallowed and said flatly, “That sounds abusive to me.”

            Giles shrugged.  “I expect it depended on the particular relationship.  Some of them were healthy, some of them weren’t.  Mostly, of course, they ended when one got the other killed.”

            “Which is totally different from the other kind of Watcher-Slayer relationship,” Buffy said tartly.

            Giles ducked his head, laughing.  “You see my point.”

            She did see his point, but she didn’t have to like it.  She blew out a sharp sigh.

            “That’s what Robson was getting at, of course,” Giles said.  “That we’ve got no business claiming the moral high ground based on our particular relationship.  Glad I wasn’t there.  Probably would have socked him one right there in the Kings Arms.”

            “You and me both.  Brian had to hold my hand pretty tight under the table.”

            “_Brian_ restrained _you_?  Ha!”  Giles was getting far too much enjoyment out of this conversation.

            “He says he did it for his own benefit as well,” Buffy said.  “I think his biggest beef was what it all said about Elisabeth.”

            “Well, yes.”  Giles’s amusement dimmed.  “There’s that, of course.  What did she do about it?”

            “Oh, she referred to his ‘feeble efforts’ to protect a Potential, and then gave him a tongue-lashing about hypocrisy when he got mad.”

            “Good,” Giles said.

            “I don’t think you need to worry about her.”

            “No,” he said.  “Or you.”

            She gave him a look.  “Thanks for the vote of confidence, Giles.”

            “You’re quite welcome,” he said, with an austere little grin.

 

*

 

_Subheading:  Restoration_.

            Fairytale, scrawled Elisabeth, was far more radical in its premise than other kinds of writing precisely because it both called back to the very foundations of thought and also pointed forward to a restoration of the world, a redress of some wrong or a repair of something broken.

            _You could not make straight what was crooked_.

            Someday, Elisabeth thought, she would find out how precisely Charles Bowen had got mixed up with Watchers—if it were possible.  How possible could it be for someone to trace her own path to where she got mixed up with Watchers?  And had one event triggered the other?  In any event, the things that had happened, the concomitant energy of them, had pushed these few days to a high tension—the meniscus of water that was not yet ready to flow.  Not yet; not yet.

            They had nearly, she thought, reached the place to start.

 

*

 

They walked back together, the wind ruffling Giles’s hair and flicking the puffball on Buffy’s hat, the sun sinking ahead of them toward late afternoon.

            Before they reached the head of the path on the road, however, Giles slowed almost to a stop.  “Do you think we’ll be all right now?” he asked her.

            She knew he was thinking, now that she was about to leave, of the reasons why he’d asked her here in the first place.  She stopped and turned to face him.  “What do you want me to say?” she said, slowly, looking him in the face.

            He met her eye with a small smile, and there, there was the Giles that she loved.  “Lie to me,” he said.

            “We’ll never fight again,” Buffy said promptly.  “We’ll always want the same thing for our people.  We’ll always choose the same direction and it’ll always be the right one.  We’ll never say mean things to each other, or make each other cry, or have to drink an ass-load of scotch to reconnect, or put each other in danger.”

            He was laughing quietly by the time she finished.  “You’re a terrible liar,” he said, and held out his arms at the same moment she went forward to hug him.

            The sun had slipped down a little farther before either of them let go.

 

*

 

That evening Elisabeth brought her laptop down to the lounge and they all three crowded onto the couch to watch movies on the DVD drive.  Giles hogged the popcorn bowl until he got sleepy, after which he relinquished the bowl to Buffy and rested his head on Elisabeth’s shoulder.  Later, in the middle of _The Princess Bride_, when the popcorn bowl had been abandoned on the floor almost empty, he slid down still further to lay his head in Elisabeth’s lap and his sock feet in Buffy’s.  With an indulgent snort Buffy gathered them in and let her hands rest over him; she glanced at Elisabeth, whose tired focus was fixed on the computer screen, but whose hands moved slowly, combing his hair with her fingertips in soft, tender strokes.

            Suddenly, Buffy wished she wasn’t going home.

            From where she sat, she could only see a little of Giles’s face, but she knew he was asleep when he released a soft little-boy sigh and relaxed.  She and Elisabeth looked at one another briefly and suppressed a laugh, but they let him sleep until the movie was finished.  Buffy gathered up Giles’s limp feet and moved them over the edge of the couch while Elisabeth shook his shoulder.  “Bedtime,” Elisabeth said, as Buffy got up to stretch and eject the DVD from Elisabeth’s computer.

            “Not quite for me,” Buffy said on a yawn.  “I’ve got to start packing.”

            “Need any laundry done?” Elisabeth asked.  She had succeeded in getting Giles to sit up, bleary-eyed with his hair sticking up in several directions.

            “Nope, did it this morning.”

            “Okay.”

            “Need help getting sleepyhead to bed?” Buffy asked.

            “‘M quite capable of getting to bed myself, thank you,” Giles said, with dignity.

            He stood up and combed a hand through his hair, making it worse; and they laughed at him.

 

*

 

Elisabeth and Giles together took Buffy to the airport, exactly as they’d brought her, only now the silence in the car was full of a much more welcome sadness.  Buffy watched the countryside slip by, thinking of the lifetimes she’d lived since she came.  She thought of the gifts she had been given, and of the most important gift: perspective. 

            In the front seat Elisabeth was absently humming “We Three Kings” and composing a text message to Brian on her cell.  When she got to the refrain, Giles began softly to sing along:  “Ohhh-ohh…star of wonder, star of light….”

            They ended up all singing, of course, except Buffy had to drop out on the verses because she didn’t know the ones about all the gifts.  “You guys really are geeks.  You know that, don’t you,” she said, and Giles smirked at her in the rearview mirror.

 

*

 

They had stopped to see Andrew on their way, and found him busily cleaning the flat from top to bottom.  Elisabeth thanked him warmly; Giles hinted he’d stop by perhaps that evening or the next morning—Buffy approved the tacit strategy of keeping Andrew on his toes; and Buffy shook hands with him.  “I’ll be seeing you in February,” she said firmly.

            Andrew nodded.  He looked less like the wide-eyed case of arrested development he had been the year before, and more like a young man, though still troubled.

            Buffy wondered what she had looked like, before she began to understand her calling.

            However many lifetimes ago that was.

 

*

 

They were calling her for pre-boarding.  Buffy turned to Elisabeth and hugged her hard, till she grunted.  “Sorry,” she said, pulling away with a laugh.  “Never got the hang of gauging hug strength.”

            “I don’t mind,” Elisabeth said.  “Take care of yourself.  Watch your back.”

            “Will do,” Buffy said, and turned to Giles.

            She had thought they would simply repeat the long hug they had had the day before; but instead, Giles took her gently by the shoulders and pressed a soft kiss on her forehead.  For the brief moment it lasted, she closed her eyes, and brought one hand up instinctively to touch his.  Then he pulled away, and looked down at her without saying anything.  She met his eye: they had said it already. 

She offered him a small smile; then she shouldered her carry-on and walked toward the gate without looking back.

 

*

 

The cat met them at the door, chirruping and darting round their legs in a quick trot, herding them toward the kitchen.  “Yes, yes, we know it’s dinnertime,” Elisabeth said, as Rupert took her coat and hung it next to his on the pegs they had mounted on the foyer wall behind the door.

            They fed the cat and fixed themselves a late tea: Elisabeth grilled them some Reubens while Rupert sliced cheese and fruit.  They had not had the house so thoroughly to themselves before, and the sensation was an inchoate mixture of loneliness, exultation, and uncertainty.  As darkness fell and cloaked the earth, Elisabeth went through the house turning on lights, and Rupert made no objection.  He began the task of laundering all the used bedding in the house; then when the first load was in the dryer, he went upstairs in search of her.

            She was in the office, puttering about putting books on the wall shelves.  A warm light issued from the new lamp on her desk.  As he came in and leaned on the doorframe she turned and saw him, and smiled.  “I’ve finished the new outline,” she said.  “Shall I read it to you?”

            “Please,” he said.  He came in and seated himself on one of the upturned wooden crates that had lately held a heavy pile of occult volumes, which now occupied the study shelves downstairs.

            She read him the outline, and elaborated on the notes she had made to go with it; he commented on a few points, and they let the subject draw the discussion where it would.  Though they made no mention of it, Elisabeth could see that he knew as well as she did how the images and concepts of her thesis applied to their lives, and that he took this as a matter of course: and a little more of the old uncertainty fell away.

            Time drew toward bed; Elisabeth battened down the house for the night and turned off all the extraneous lights, then helped Rupert to fold sheets and towels and carry them upstairs.  Together they made their bed, smoothing down sheets and blankets and duvet; then almost at once unmade it after changing into pajamas and washing.

            When the lights were out, they lay quietly without moving; once the darkness had given way to their night vision, Rupert turned to her, slipped an arm round her waist, and kissed her.  She kissed him back; but the kiss ended, and he lay his head down on her breast, still silent.  It had come to the point, now: but they were still waiting to begin, waiting for an unknown signal.

            They would have to make the signal themselves.  As soon as the thought came into Elisabeth’s mind, Rupert also rose up, throwing off the covers, and got out of the bed.  She put out her hand in the darkness and unerringly found his, for him to draw her out of the bed with him.

            Out of the bedroom and down the stairs; their bare feet making soft sounds on the smooth, ancient floors, they made their way down the hall to the study, where the aumbry lived.  Rupert had unpacked and organized its contents: on one shelf was a battery-operated button lamp, and he pressed it, filling the large cabinet with light to choose what they would need for their working.

            An earthenware plate with heavy blue glaze; a sturdy, unused white candle; a small bag filled with gem-like grains of incense, and a charcoal pat; a small braid of sweet grass:  Elisabeth watched him remove them one by one and pile them together on the plate.  Then she too had an idea.  She slipped away from his side and padded through the now-familiar darkness of the house to the kitchen.  When she returned, he looked expectantly to her and saw the jar of honey in her hand; and his eyes brightened.

            They sat down together on the floor, arranging their tools between them, with hands that did not hurry and did not shake.  To one side of the long plate, the candle; to the other, the charcoal.  Elisabeth let fall a drib of honey in the center of the plate and put the jar off to the side.

            Rupert lit the candle.  Elisabeth held the charcoal pat to the flame and put it down in its place to sputter and heat to a dark glow.  When it was ready, Rupert laid a pinch of incense grains carefully upon its top; curls of fragrant smoke rose from them, and the light of the candle began to glow further than its beam.

            Elisabeth laid the little braid of grass alongside the coal; it too began to smoke.  She sat up straight, and their eyes met and held.

            He held out his right hand, palm up.  “Let the four winds bear witness,” he said, his voice both soft and resonant.

            She nested her left hand in his.  “Let the four elements bear witness,” she said.

            On the other side, his left palm, his dominant hand:  “Let the four dimensions bear witness.”

            She cupped his dominant hand from below with her own.  “Let the four angels bear witness.”

            Over and around their joined hands the halo of incense and light grew, until it wove around them whole, enclosing them together in its glow.

            At the same moment they both knew when the invocation was complete: they could feel the separate individualities of one another, bone and breath, charged to utter significance.  Their next acts would ring silent and straight through the whole of space and time.

            Slowly, he moved his right hand to press level, palm to palm, with hers which he had held; his fingers longer until they meshed and clasped with hers.

            Equally slowly, she released his other hand to dip her finger in the small shining pool of honey.  She carried a generous bead of it to his lips and painted it there, from the philtrum down to the broad curve of the lower lip.  Then she leaned forward, minding the candle, put her mouth to his, and suckled the honey away.  She felt his eyelashes flutter low; he trembled suddenly, setting off an answering tremor within her.  When at last she pulled away and sat back, she felt herself incandescent from within out.

            He reached with his left hand to answer the gesture, his eyes open once more, dark and intent.  With a motion of humility he took up the rest of the honey on his finger and touched it to her lips: had they not already gone below the depth of tears, she would have wept.  He bent to her, and their eyes closed at the moment his mouth touched hers.  The tang left from the honey she had taken from his lips mingled with the fresh sweetness of the honey he took from hers, and became the sweetness of their mouths themselves, lips and tongue and teeth together.

            And this was where they had been brought, to a place both inevitable and impossible, of exultant freedom and utter troth.  When at last he sat back, their still-clasped hands radiated inward a perfect heat, taken both from their bodies and from the halo of light around them.  The light had risen and flared at their kisses outside their notice, and when they sat back, it fell again, and there was but one term left in the progression.

            Rupert took up the candle and rose, still holding Elisabeth’s hand.  She went with him back along the hall and up the stairs, the candle lighting their way, the flame purling and trailing with their movement until they had returned to their bed, where she took the candle from him and fitted it into the holder he had given her; and the flame quieted, then stood straight and still, and the light of the glass sparkled gently over them.

            They stood at the side of the bed, their gazes clasped as their hands had been.  “Do you remember?” Rupert whispered.

            The note of half-unbelieving joy in his voice made her release his hand to reach and take his face in both of hers.  “Could I forget?” she answered, and heard the deep emotion in her own voice.

            They reached, without any more hesitation, to kiss again: and their hands smoothed and tugged away one another’s clothing, breaking the kiss only long enough to pull off shirts and push back the covers.  Then she got into the bed, naked, and drew him in with her, and he pulled the thick covers up over them together.

            In the light of the candle they stroked one another’s skin with all the tremulous hunger of new touch, the sweet tang of honey still on their tongues, the half-caught glances bright and awed and almost shy.

            Elisabeth arched back and aligned their bodies, and Rupert pressed within her.  In the movement they took to themselves, all the pleasure that had brought them here became multifoliate and fractal, as if they meant to hide each glance and laugh and caress and candle’s gleam like jewels along the way of their future, and spend their years together seeking them again.

            He raised himself on strong arms above her, his eyes closed in half a prayer: she held him, her body strong to cradle his, and breathed the other half.  And after, they lay in the bed they had made, drowsing and caressing the damp curves of one another’s nakedness, and fell asleep twined together.

            Over their sleep, the candle burned steadily and still.

            And downstairs, the black shadow of the cat, their guardian, moved on silent tread from room to room, watching with unblinking eyes, until at last he too curled before the banked fire of the kitchen hearth.

            And in the perfect, chill stillness of the hour before the deepening grey of dawn, Pyke’s Lea slept.

 

*

 

_And all shall be well and_

_All manner of thing shall be well_

_When the tongues of flame are in-folded_

_Into the crowned knot of fire_

_And the fire and the rose are one._

 

*

 

_finis_


End file.
